Can You Copyright the Word of God? 🤔

The “Third Testament” Dilemma

If you were to try to copyright this article, the Copyright Office should refuse to register the copyright. After all, you can only copyright things that you wrote yourself. Merely having inspiration to encourage your writing isn’t enough to be a problem – so you would be able to copyright an article you wrote after being inspired by me. But what happens when the author claims to be channeling the true author – a divine being?

It is not at all uncommon for leaders of a new religion to claim that they are a mere conduit for God’s own words. Can those words by copyrighted? Let’s look at an imaginary religious leader, Jane Doe.

Jane Doe claims to have transcribed a new “Third Testament” dictated word-for-word by God. She insists she isn’t the author – merely the faithful scribe of a divine message.* Yet, she wants to claim copyright in this work. This raises a narrow but interesting copyright law question: can you own the copyright on your own writing when you claim you did not write it but merely copied God’s literal words? Copyright law is a human invention, designed to protect human creativity. So what happens when an author points to a deity as the true creator of a text? Let’s dive into how copyright laws in the U.S. and other Western countries handle authorship, originality, and works claimed to be of divine or non-human origin. Along the way, we’ll look at historical examples (from new holy scriptures to monkey selfies and AI art) to see how courts and copyright offices have responded to attempts at copyrighting the works of a non-human.

Authorship

At the heart of copyright law lies the concept of authorship. In general, only works that are original and created by an author qualify for protection. Crucially, modern copyright systems normally assume that the “author” is human. In the United States, for example, the Copyright Office’s guidelines explicitly state that it “will not register works produced by nature, animals, or plants”, nor works “purportedly created by divine or supernatural beings.” The Office will, however, register a work that’s merely said to be inspired by a divine spirit (so you can thank God in your preface, as long as you don’t list God as a co-author). In plainer terms: U.S. copyright protects the fruits of human creativity – not the literal word of God handed down from above.

Perhaps the entire question needs to be reconsidered. If I am the author of a work, and make claims that the book is written in a way that precludes copyright, that could be considered a dedication of the work to the public domain. For example, let’s take a haiku. The one on the left is mine (my sixth grade teacher would be either proud or disappointed, I’m not sure). The one on the right was written be Gemini AI.

If I wanted to assert copyright to the AI-drafted haiku, I’d need to lie about it because AI-written works do not (yet?) qualify for copyright protection. However, if I told everybody that the haiku on the left was written by AI and they can use it any way they want, that should function as a dedication of the copyright to the public domain. Any other result would allow me to tell people that a work is not subject to copyright, wait for somebody to use it, and then sue them (which raises a question of estoppel as well)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel. That should not be allowed. Copyright law should evolve to similarly prohibit somebody from saying that they’ve played no role in authorship and acted merely as a conduit for a divine being, waiting for people to copy it, and then suing.

Other Western jurisdictions are on the same page. Canadian commentators have indicated that an author must be a natural person, noting that copyright’s term is tied to an author’s lifespan, something only living humans have (but, consider that works created for corporations in the US and many other places have a fixed copyright term, which undercuts the argument that only a human can author copyrighted material due to the way patent terms are calculated). In the EU, the standard for originality is often phrased as the work being the author’s own intellectual creation, which inherently points to a human intellect at work. UK law even had an unusual provision for “computer-generated” works.

Divine Inspiration vs. Human Creation

Now, what if the inspiration is divine, but a human still did the writing? History is full of people claiming their works were guided by a higher power. Copyright law doesn’t mind if you say God inspired you, as long as you are the one who actually crafted the expression. For instance, a songwriter might truly feel their muse was divine, but since they chose the notes and lyrics, they are the author in the eyes of the law. Problems arise only when the human insists they added no creative input at all – that they were just a stenographer taking divine dictation. Even then, there is a pathway to finding copyright. In a case that has since been reversed, but which provides a roadmap for divine works, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (US) found that the flourishes a performer provides can themselves give rise to copyright. That case is no longer good law, but the theory has legs in other contexts. For example, if I am told a story and do my best to transcribe it from memory, I will inevitably get some portions wrong and generate them from a combination of my spotty memory and my creativity. I’ll include my own rhetorical flourishes. Adding that flair may be enough to create what would oddly enough be considered a derivative work of a work originally generated by a deity. Since the deity would not sue me, it would not give rise to liability for an unlicensed derivative work (although I suppose a living deity in some religions might be bale to do so).

United States courts faced this issue head-on in a case about an “angelically authored” book of revelation. The Urantia Book was supposedly transmitted by celestial beings and merely compiled and edited by a group of humans in the 1930s. When a devotee challenged the copyright, arguing that a book written by celestial beings isn’t a “work of authorship” under the law, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals got pragmatic. The judges diplomatically sidestepped deciding whether angels are real authors and instead found that the human contributors did enough – by selecting, arranging, and compiling the revelations – to inject the required spark of human creativityblogs.kentlaw.iit.edublogs.kentlaw.iit.edu. The court noted that “it is not creations of divine beings that the copyright laws were intended to protect,” so “some element of human creativity must have occurred” to make the book copyrightableregent.edu. In fact, those first humans who compiled and arranged the transcripts could claim authorship “in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.”law.justia.com In short, if God (or Gabriel) hands you content on stone tablets, you’d better at least decide how to organize or present it – otherwise the law sees no human author at work and thus no copyright.

At the end of the day, copyright law in the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, EU, etc., is decidedly earthly. It’s designed to encourage humans (and humans only) to create by giving them economic rights in their creations. Actually, let’s be serious. Humans would creative even if their copyright “ONLY” lasted for 40 years. The gargantuan copyright terms simply help corporations squeeze money out of their creations until well after everybody involved in the creation is dead. Copyright law is not designed to allocate rights between mortals and deities (and what deity will actually file a federal suit for infringement?). Courts won’t venture into whether God actually authored something – they’ll simply look for a human hand in the work. If it’s there, they’ll grant copyright to that human (or the entity they assign it to). If it’s absent, the work falls into the public domain, available for anyone to print, adapt, or remix (heresy aside).

Footnotes:

* Copyright offices could adopt a rule that says “Where a person submits a work that they wrote with no evidence of copying other than a claim by the author that some or all of what they wrote was provided by a divine or otherwise non-corporeal being, that person is considered the author of the work.” This raises interesting questions, such as whether a refusal to recognize a divine being as the author of the work (and therefore the only one eligible for a copyright) violates the First Amendment or statutes such as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. This is not a blog about religious freedom, so I don’t delve into it. You can always find other blogs that do focus on it.