Trademark Terror

Thank God that bloody Da Vinci Code trial is over and that the court found against the authors of Holy Blood and The Holy Grail and their claims that Dan Brown had plaigairised them by having the audacity to use the same plot device that they had tried to pass off as fact, in a work of fiction. If they'd won, then I could have been in trouble, as they could presumably have come after The Sleaze for its publication of Holy Shit, Holy Grail, which also claimed that Jesus hadn't died on the cross - after escaping to France and fathering several children with Mary Magdelene, he finally expired of old age and was buried on the site of a contemporary public toilet. Very similar to the other book, I think you'll agree.

Mind you, the threat of being sued for plaigairism or copyright infringement can be a powerful deterrent. One of the biggest revelations in the recent trial of alleged 9/11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui, was that Al Qaeida had abandoned plans to fly a hijacked airliner into the Capitol Building's dome in Washington under threat of a legal challenge from Tom Clancy. According to the certifiably insane - but clearly still highly dangerous - Moussaoui, Clancy got wind of the Al Qaeida plot through his contacts in the US intelligence community and, shocked by what he'd learned, immediately ordered his lawyers to issue a 'cease and desist' notice to Osama bin Laden, on the grounds that his 1996 novel Executive Orders had already used the same plot device. A spokesperson for the terror outfit later confirmed these claims in a posting on a geocities-hosted website: "Listen, this guy had powerful lawyers, there was no way we were going to get drawn into some legal battle with him. We could have been tied up in the courts for years - it would have meant posponing the attacks and that could have cost us thousands in the additional wages we would have had to pay the suicide pilots while we waited for a verdict! We just decided to go for the Pentagon, instead!"

The incident has had a knock-on effect for Al Qaeida, with every potential terror plot now being run past its lawyers for possible copyright infringements, before being put into action. "So many things are off the agenda now - we can't let off nuclear devices in sports stadiums, for instance! That damn Clancy again - he got there first with Sum of All Fears," explained the terrorists' spokesperson. "We also can't use giant mirrors to focus sunlight into a deadly death ray - Eon Productions have a restraining order against us ripping off Die Another Day - and anything involving blowing up the Houses of Parliament has been off the agenda since V For Vendetta! Mind you, we are thinking of suing Warner Brothers over that one for the use of tube trains as weapons of terror!"