Organized religion presupposes community and authority; it requires the shrewd balancing of institutional policies for which modern intellectual property (IP) is well fitted. Ancient and medieval Christianity had no copyrights. Instead, it enjoyed a “natural” monopoly conferred by the technologies of the day. The slow copying of texts by pious scribes and the circulating of manuscripts among a small literate elite barred the rampant free riding feared by today's IP owners. Such an arduous mode of production was its own copyright. Pre-technological source identifiers and other pious devices shaped consumer choices: Christianity's vivid martyrdoms were persuasive truth in advertising; Gnostic ideas were early trade secrets shared cautiously in codex copies, and Saints’ relics and fragments of the True Cross functioned as famous trademarks. Yet formal IP laws lay centuries in the future.
What need does religion have of the artificial scarcity induced by copyright laws? Cambridge University Press (Andrew Ventimiglia's publisher) is the crown's patentee for United Kingdom rights in the King James Bible. However, the idea of a copyright needing to exist in a sacred text first published in 1611 seems bizarre outside of countries like the United Kingdom with an established church governed by a temporal monarch. The unlimited distribution of free Bibles by Gideons International is the more natural destiny of a public good meant to bring good tidings of great joy to the masses. Yet, as Ventimiglia shows in his well-researched chapters, modern American religions have struggled to strike a balance between control and dissemination of texts, between stamping spiritual goods with brand identity and allowing them to circulate freely in a crowded marketplace. Lacking the natural monopoly conferred on early religions by low literacy rates and slow copying technologies, the modern business of evangelizing has embraced IP laws.
That embrace has been an ambivalent one in the United States, as Ventimiglia richly demonstrates. To corporatize or not to corporatize—that is the question that has haunted the new age religions central to his study: Christian Science, the Urantia Foundation, the Worldwide Church of God, and Scientology. Copyright law, with its flexible licensing, has been an important tool for religious entrepreneurs, but it also poses difficulties for claims of faith. If founding scriptures are truths revealed by golden plates (Mormonism) or angelic “midwayers” (Urantia) (83), United States copyright law, which requires a human creator behind human or corporate authorship, might deny protection to such works. Religious organizations are forced to pick their poison: maintain the origin story of divine authorship and potentially lose copyright, or concede admixtures of human creativity and salvage copyright in a hybrid holy book (83–105). The human stain may mar celestial messaging, but it helps to make copyright stick.
If angels cannot be authors, can religions be IP-owning and -enforcing corporations without losing their identity as selfless sanctuaries for the faithful? Ventimiglia probes this question in its many branches. Copyrights give their owners the confidence to disseminate works widely. Some modern religions initially gained a large following through open-access distribution, only to apply “rigorously controlled and highly centralized publication practices” later on (7). In recounting the history of The Urantia Book in Chapter 1, Ventimiglia tells a tale of two copyright practices, with the Urantia Foundation serving as the religion's legal-corporate arm, and the Urantia Brotherhood as its educational-social arm. The foundation used copyrights to slow the spread of Urantia teachings, fostering gradual, timed-release enlightenment among licensed reading groups (57–58). In contrast, the Brotherhood urged aggressive mass marketing (67–70). Ventimiglia locates a similar internal split in the Worldwide Church of God when its leaders repudiated the controversial teachings of its founder, Herbert Armstrong, and used his postmortem copyrights to suppress his writings (150–77). One is reminded of William Wordsworth's wish for longer copyrights that would allow him to withhold his disavowed early poems from republication.
Ventimiglia argues that United States copyright law influenced religion, and that religion influenced copyright law. The former claim is certainly true, as he amply demonstrates. The latter is less clear. The United States Copyright Act contains only a few instances of the word “religious,” mostly relating to an innocuous exemption for performances and displays during public worship services (17 U.S.C. § 110[3]). One might say that American sects try to shape copyright law, only to be rebuffed by law in the end. For example, while the federal trial judge in the Worldwide Church of God case appeared to promote spiritual values in his finding of fair use, the Ninth Circuit, on appeal, corrected this legal error by applying standard economics and the “transformative” test for fair use (160–73; Worldwide Church of God v. Philadelphia Church of God, Inc., 227 F.3d 1110 [9th Cir. 2000]). And when the United States Congress succumbed to religious lobbying in 1971 and enacted a unique private law to extend copyrights in Mary Baker Eddy's writings, the courts struck down the law as an unconstitutional establishment of religion (211–20; United Christian Scientists v. Christian Science Board of Directors, 829 F.2d 1152 [D.C. Cir. 1987]). The separation of church and state is alive and well in United States copyright law, and far from a “pretense” (154).
