So dark the con of judges

• The decision in the UK Dan Brown copyright lawsuit holds a surprise or two itself.

About the only good thing to come out of this asinine Da Vinci Code trial is the revelation that the presiding judge has a healthy sense of humor:

For the past three weeks, lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic have been puzzling over a series of strange italicisations in Mr Justice Smith's 71-page judgment, which was handed down on April 7. The odd letters appeared to crop up randomly throughout the text and most people assumed they were typographical errors. But on closer examination, a pattern has emerged.

The first clue - the word claimants with the s in italics - is found in paragraph one of the document. In the next paragraph, the m in claimant is italicised. Read together, the italicised letters in the first seven paragraphs spell out the self-referential legend "Smithy code".

I wish that this was the end of the publicity over this book, but, alas, 'tis not to be.