The Foundation—with regard to the fiduciary responsibility given to it—trusts in the fact that when Jesus directed Helen [Schucman] to perfect the copyright in A Course in Miracles, he intended that the Course be protected by copyright limitations within the ego framework. In effect, this ensures that the Course will remain intact and exactly as it was given, so that it will never be diluted, distorted, or changed.
Jesseph thus presented a rationale that described the use of copyright as a necessary compromise with human law put in the service of divine warrant. Instead of explaining the foundation’s use of intellectual property rights as simply being in the service of economic and distributional efficiencies, Jesseph instead described it as a mechanism for the maintenance of a divinely sanctioned message. The content of A Course in Miracles was susceptible to distortion, alteration and misinterpretation by the corrupting practices of those outside the Foundation’s networks of circulation, thus legal recourse to prevent such distortion was an entirely appropriate, even spiritually motivated strategy.
Jesseph’s justification does not conform to dominant understandings of copyright in the United States that usually depend either on a rationale grounded in the protection of the moral rights of [ostensibly human] authors or economic incentives designed to promote the production of creative goods. Nevertheless, he resurrected a sublimated theme within the law regarding intellectual property as intimately tied to questions of propriety. Foundation co-founder Kenneth Wapnick extended this logic even further in his statements after the case, describing the reading of current public domain versions of the Course (the urtext or the Cayce version) as a moral violation of the privacy of Schucman and Thetford, akin to listening in on a private conversation conducted between the scribes and Jesus and not yet reshaped into an official document destined for public consumption.
So what are we to make of the role of intellectual property as a determinant of the nature and role of a spiritual text within a religious organization? For those who inhabit non-traditional, unchurched types of spiritual community, communities whose coherence lies not in a centralized space like the church but instead in the realm of literary works and other forms of shared religious media, intellectual property law may provide a uniquely effective means to reestablish a measure of control. By providing legal tools capable of administering the texts by which intrinsically ephemeral beliefs and practices are mediated, intellectual property law can help to establish official works and stabilize their religiously approved meaning while also permitting the patrol of the very channels of distribution that move those beliefs and practices between members of a newly articulated community. For those organizations that still market spirituality but distance themselves from traditional forms of religion, they may look to new mechanisms to assert a measure of authority and control over their product. And as the physical, sacred property of the church becomes less central to contemporary practice, so may the intangible and ephemeral, yet equally sacred intellectual property move to take its place.
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