Referring to the unclear dividing fact and fiction in literature, Zunshine writes:
“Think of our own bookshops’ commitment to carefully demarcating shelves containing fiction from those containing non-fiction, even though the former offer plenty of information that deserves to be assimilated by our cognitive systems as architecturally true, and the latter contains a broad variety of cultural fictions (just consider treatises on dating and dieting).(Zunshine, Lisa, Why we read books, Section 5 of Part 1, Location 1314 in Kindle version)

This has had legal implications: the authors of “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail” took Dan Brown to court claiming that Brown had plagiarised the framework of their book for “The Da Vinci Code”. The court ruled that because “Holy Blood” was alleged by its authors to be history, its premises could be interpreted in any fictional work without any copyright infringement (Wikipedia, edited)

Thus if it’s non-fiction, the facts can’t be copyright!

John Stafford