[WikiEN-l] A course in walled gardens?

Fri Jun 30 19:33:47 UTC 2006

On 6/30/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at 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.)