‘Da Vinci’ judge has code of his own

THE judge who presided at the “Da Vinci Code” copyright infringement trial has put a code of his own into his ruling, and he said Wednesday that he would “probably” confirm it to the person who breaks it.

Since Judge Peter Smith delivered his ruling April 7 in favor of Dan Brown, the author of “The Da Vinci Code,” lawyers in London and New York began noticing odd italicizations in the 71-page document.

In the weeks afterward, would-be code breakers got to work on deciphering Smith’s code.

“I can’t discuss the judgment,” Smith said in a brief conversation with the Associated Press, “but I don’t see why a judgment should not be a matter of fun.”

Italics are placed in strange spots: The first is found in the first paragraph of the 360-paragraph document. The letter “s” in the word “claimants” is italicized.

In the next paragraph, “claimant” is spelled with an italicized “m,” and so on.

The italicized letters in the first seven paragraphs spell out “Smithy code,” playing on the judge’s name.

Lawyer Dan Tench, with the London firm Olswang, said he noticed the code when he spotted the striking italicized script in an online copy of the judgment.

“To encrypt a message in this manner, in a High Court judgment no less? It’s out there,” Tench said. “I think he was getting into the spirit of the thing. It doesn’t take away from the validity of the judgment. He was just having a bit of fun.”

Smith was arguably the highlight of the trial, with his acerbic questions and witty observations making the sometimes dry testimony more lively. Though Smith on Wednesday refused to discuss the judgment or acknowledge outright that he’d inserted a secret code in its pages, he said: “They don’t look like typos, do they?”

When asked if someone would break the code, Smith said: “I don’t know. It’s not a difficult thing to do.” And when asked if he would confirm a correct guess to an aspiring code breaker, he said, “Probably.”

Tench said the judge teasingly remarked that the code was a mixture of the italicized font code found in the “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail” -- two of whose authors, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, unsuccessfully sued Brown’s publisher, Random House Inc., for copyright infringement -- and the code found in Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code,” which was published in March 2003.