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Copyright and the Other
Worlds
There is a rather unique quandry with copyright
and channeled works, the purported author does not
live on planet earth and as such does not enjoy the
benefits of legal protection. This has been brought
out in recent legal decisions such as those for
Urantia
and A
Course in Miracles. In the case of
Urantia the source is presumably an
extra-terrestrial being, while the ACIM is
said to be dicated by the spirit of Jesus. The
Urantia case has been going on for over 30
years. Appeals to the recent ACIM
decision could keep it in litigation as well.
For a commentary on the Urantia case see Urantia:
The Great Cult Mystery by Martin Gardner.
Several approaches are adopted by
authors/channelers.
1) Channeled works may be issued as anonymous or
with only the name of the unembodied being (and not
of the channel) in the absence of any copyright
marking. The anonymous British title Christ in
You falls in this niche.
2) The author may leave their name off the work,
but place it on a copyright office form in the
hopes no one will challenge the legality of that
act. So far the courts have invalidated the
copyrights for the Urantia and ACIM
cases where this was done.
3) The author may include the channeled material
along with personal commentary, history, etc.
composed by the channel in the conscious state thus
giving clear legal title to the work as a whole to
the author. Those portions of the work that were
channeled are still up in the air in this case. A
great number of channeled titles that come out
nowadays take this approach.
4) The author may keep the source of the
knowledge a secret and paraphrase it such as
Stewart White's very early and now forgotten work
Why Be A Mud Turtle. In later years he
acknowedged his wife's psychic abilities in a
number of much better books.
5) The author may take the channeled material
and extensively edit the wording so as to amplify
the aesthetic appeal of the content. William Butler
Yeats' A Vision would be good example
6) The author may make no direct claim about the
source or may claim inspired authorship, i.e. the
ideas came from spirit, but the words and phrasing
came from the mind of the author. The
Conversations with God books may fall in
this category.
7) The author may throw humility to the wind and
lie about the authorship.
Problems can develop later for publishers that
think works from other realms represent high wisdom
and need to be kept in print. The heirs or
executors of such works may have unanticipated
earthly concerns. What if progeny become born again
Christians and think these are works of the devil
or are just embarassed by the taint of family
psychism? What happens if a foundation who owns the
copyright elects not to keep all such works from
its benefactor in print, but just one or two
best-sellers? About 100 new channeled works are
published each year and it is unlikely that the
true and full intent of either the unembodied
entity or the channeler are expressed in the
copyright notice. There is a movement afoot
emanating from Stanford by the distinguished
professor Lawrence
Lessig, author of Free
Culture and promotor of the Creative
Commons copyright licencing concept.
Some of the academic implications of dual
authorship are discussed in works such as Writing
double: women's literary partnerships by
Bette Lynn London by and other books cited by
Professor Helen
Sword.
A simple check of U.S. copyright renewal status
can be done at ibiblio.org.
More complete information is available in books
like:
The
Public Domain: How to Find & Use Copyright-Free
Writings, Music, Art & More by Stephen
Fishman, Nolo Press, 2004
Getting
Permission: How to License & Clear Copyrighted
Materials Online & Off by Richard W.
Stim, Nolo Press, 2004
The
copyright permission and libel handbook : a
step-by-step guide for writers, editors, and
publishers by Lloyd J Jassin & Steven C
Schechter,Wiley, 1998.
Copyright law is in a great state of flux due to
heavy lobbying by the RIAA. There is an mp3
audio
interview about this with Lawrence Lessig at
DigitalVillage.org.
Free Downloads of Free Culture by Lawrence
Lessig
You can listen
to or download free copies of his new book in
many convenient formats including two Macintosh
friendly versions: FreeCulture.txt
and FreeCulture.sit.
The .txt version lets you create your own type size
and margins for ease of reading in most text and
word processors. The .sit is the .txt version
compressed with Stuffit
5.0
More versions are available here
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