Brown is just doing what we all do every day, and what we've all been trained to do through years of schooling: Take an idea, go to the library or online to look for facts that support or deny that idea or examples to enhance it then write your paper, letter, book or song.

If there still is such a thing as an original idea, I'd like to hear about it. Turn on any TV show or open any newspaper, magazine or book, and chances are that most stories are there because the writer, editor or producer saw it somewhere else first. If the judge rules that Brown did indeed plagiarize from Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh's 1982 book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, a book that they've profited from handsomely, needless to say research as we know it, for writers, students, professionals, anyone who relies on any form of media, will be forever changed.

The worst-case scenario is that a flurry of unfounded accusations will emanate from slighted creative types everywhere, with the "authors" of overheard conversations suing writers for "copying" their words and ideas. This prospect is much more frightening than James Frey's sin of thinking his fiction was no different from nonfiction. In the aftermath, the only thing that's changed in the publishing industry is that the fact-checking calvary is now called in whenever a manuscript is tagged as a "memoir."

Industry wags figure the plaintiffs' chances at winning are about as good as Dan Brown's fifth novel being published this year, an extreme long shot since a manuscript is nowhere in sight. Publishing insiders pegged the trial as a cheap publicity stunt from the start, launched only to attract attention for Holy Blood and for Baigent's next book, The Jesus Papers, to be published April 1, just in time for the worldwide release of The Da Vinci Code movie in mid-May.

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The fact of the matter is that Baigent and Leigh didn't pluck the premise for Holy Blood, Holy Grail out of thin air, since it's been written about and bandied about for centuries. They read about it somewhere else first. Just like Dan Brown. No one — artist or not — lives in a vacuum. We learn from and are inspired by the ideas of others, which we then absorb and convert into our own. Then someday, someone else will hopefully be likewise inspired by our ideas. Perhaps Chilean novelist Isabel Allende said it best in her book Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses: "Copying one author is plagiarism. Copying many is research."