On 6/30/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
I've been looking round the articles relating to [[A Course In Miracles]] (ACIM). One article details a court case pertaining to authorship, under the rather bizarre premise that since authorship was claimed to be Jesus, "channeled" through Helen Schucman, copyright did not apply.
As a historical footnote, it should be noted that the question of whether "inspired" works are applicable to intellectual property protections goes back to the very origins of the concept of intellectual property. It is part of two different (and competing) definitions of the author as being with a craftsman or being "inspired." During the Renaissance proponents of authorial rights turned the "inspired" notion around so that the author was inspired by their own "original genius" rather than God (or a muse) and thus gave them more of a claim to their own property. It is interesting that it continues to play out in some small way today when the legal definition of intellectual property is much more codified than it was in, say, the eighteenth century.
Anyway, this little tidbit has nothing much to do with your query in particular, I'm afraid...
FF
(The reference for this, for those interested, is available on JSTOR as Martha Woodmansee, "The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the 'Author'," _Eighteenth Century Studies_ 17:4 (Summer 1984): 425-448. I feel something like a parody of an academic at the moment, but perhaps that's just fine.)