Urantia Foundation v. Maaherra

• Decision Date: 10 June 1997
• Docket Number: No. 95-17093,95-17093
• Citation: 114 F.3d 955
• Parties: 1997 Copr.L.Dec. P 27,653, 43 U.S.P.Q.2d 1001, 25 Media L. Rep. 1873, 97 Cal. Daily Op. Serv. 4369, 97 Daily Journal D.A.R. 7285 URANTIA FOUNDATION, a non-profit foundation, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Kristen MAAHERRA, Defendant-Appellee.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Ninth Circuit

Page 955

114 F.3d 955

1997 Copr.L.Dec. P 27,653, 43 U.S.P.Q.2d 1001,

25 Media L. Rep. 1873, 97 Cal. Daily Op. Serv. 4369,

97 Daily Journal D.A.R. 7285

URANTIA FOUNDATION, a non-profit foundation, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Kristen MAAHERRA, Defendant-Appellee.

No. 95-17093.

United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit.

Argued and Submitted Jan. 14, 1997.

Decided June 10, 1997.

Gordon Dean Booth, Jr., Booth, Owens & Jospin, Atlanta, Georgia, and Robert S. Venning, Heller, Ehrman, White & McAuliffe, San Francisco, CA, for plaintiff-appellant.

Joseph D. Lewis, Cleary, Komen & Lewis, LLP, Washington, DC, Robert C. Lind, Los Angeles, CA, for defendant-appellee.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Arizona; Warren K. Urbom, Senior District Judge, Presiding. D.C. No. CV-91-00325-SMM.

Before DONALD P. LAY, ^* GOODWIN, and SCHROEDER, Circuit Judges.

OPINION

SCHROEDER, Circuit Judge:

This is a copyright dispute between parties who believe the copyrighted work, the Urantia Book, was authored by celestial beings and transcribed, compiled and collected by mere mortals. In this litigation, the plaintiff-appellant Urantia Foundation claims that the defendant-appellee Kristen Maaherra infringed the Foundation's copyright when she distributed a computerized version of the Book on disk. Maaherra concedes copying, so the only issue before us is whether the Foundation owns a valid copyright in the Book.

The district court granted summary judgment to Maaherra on the ground that the Foundation's renewal copyright was invalid. Urantia Foundation v. Maaherra, 895 F.Supp. 1347 (D.Ariz.1995). ¹ The court determined that the Foundation was not a proper renewal claimant because the Book was not a "work made for hire," as claimed on the renewal certificate, and that even though the Book could have qualified as a "composite work," the Foundation had failed to show that it was its "proprietor." See 17 U.S.C. § 304(a) (providing that proprietors of composite works and works made for hire can claim renewal). We conclude that the Foundation has established that it was, at the time of renewal, the proprietor of a composite work, and that the mistaken description on the renewal certificate does not affect the validity of the renewal. We therefore reverse the district court's grant of summary judgment in favor of Maaherra.

BACKGROUND

Central to an understanding of the case is the history, as perceived by both parties, of the creation of the Book. Both parties believe that the words in the Book were "authored" by non-human spiritual beings described in terms such as the Divine Counselor, the Chief of the Corps of Superuniverse Personalities, and the Chief of the Archangels of Nebadon. These spiritual entities are thought to have delivered the teachings, that were eventually assembled in the Book, "through" a patient of a Chicago psychiatrist, Dr. Sadler.

The parties also agree that to understand these divine messages better and to share them with the rest of the world, Dr. Sadler formed a group of five or six followers, called the Contact Commission. At first, the members of the Contact Commission started discussing the divine teachings among themselves. Then, apparently in response to what they perceived to be prompting from the spiritual beings, and in collaboration with a larger group of followers called the Forum, the Contact Commission began to pose specific questions to the spiritual beings. The answers to these questions, as transmitted to the humans and arranged by them, became the Urantia Papers. At some point, the manuscript containing the Papers was intentionally destroyed after the creation of about 2,000 printing plates.

Members of the Contact Commission, including founding member Dr. Sadler, then formed the Urantia Foundation, an Illinois charitable trust, for one purpose: to preserve and disseminate the teachings contained in the Papers. It appears that the Foundation was, at least initially, headquartered at Dr. Sadler's home. The Contact Commission transferred the printing plates to the Foundation through the trust instrument.

The transfer is detailed in a district court opinion, arising in another circuit, and also involving the validity of the Foundation's copyright in the Book, but analyzing the validity of the original, rather than the renewal copyright. Urantia Foundation v. Burton, 210 U.S.P.Q. 217 (W.D.Mich.1980). The Burton court found that the trust instrument described the Foundation's primary estate as consisting of the printing plates on which the Papers were inscribed. The instrument also provided that the trustees were specifically empowered, and had the duty, "to retain absolute and unconditional control of all plates and other media for the printing and reproduction of the Urantia Book and any translation thereof...." Id. at 219 (citing to Paragraph 3.3 of the trust instrument).

The Foundation published the Book in 1955. The original copyright certificate was issued to the Foundation in 1956. The Foundation renewed the copyright in 1983.

In 1990, Maaherra, who resides in Arizona, and who describes herself as "an avid reader of the [Book] since 1969," prepared a study aid that included the entire text of the Book and started distributing it free of charge to various individuals. That same year, the Foundation learned that someone was distributing the Book on computer disks, using the Foundation's trademarks. Upon discovering that Maaherra was responsible for this, the Foundation filed the instant suit in 1991. See Urantia Foundation v. Maaherra, 895 F.Supp. 1338 (D.Ariz.1995) (recounting this chronology).

This appeal is from the district court's October 25, 1995 amended final judgment based on its February 10, 1995 order granting summary judgment to Maaherra on the Foundation's copyright infringement claim. See Urantia, 895 F.Supp. at 1347.

DISCUSSION

Copyrightability of the Book

A threshold issue in this case is whether the work, because it is claimed to embody the words of celestial beings rather than human beings, is copyrightable at all. "To qualify for copyright protection, a work must be original to the author." Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc., 499 U.S. 340, 345, 111 S.Ct. 1282, 1287, 113 L.Ed.2d 358 (1991) (citation omitted). The core statute, 17 U.S.C. § 102(a), provides:

[c]opyright protection subsists ... in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, ... from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.

17 U.S.C. § 102(a). "Original, as the term is used in copyright, means only that the work was independently created by the author (as opposed to copied from other works), and that it possesses at least some minimal degree of creativity." Feist, 499 U.S. at 345, 111 S.Ct. at 1287 (citation omitted).

Maaherra claims that there can be no valid copyright in the Book because it lacks the requisite ingredient of human creativity, and that therefore the Book is not a "work of authorship" within the meaning of the Copyright Act. The copyright laws, of course, do not expressly require "human" authorship, and considerable controversy has arisen in recent years over the copyrightability of computer-generated works. See Arthur R. Miller, Copyright Protection for Computer Programs, Databases, and Computer-Generated Works: Is Anything New Since CONTU?, 106 Harv.L.Rev. 977 (1993). We agree with Maaherra, however, that it is not creations of divine beings that the copyright laws were intended to protect, and that in this case some element of human creativity must have occurred in order for the Book to be copyrightable. At the very least, for a worldly entity to be guilty of infringing a copyright, that entity must have copied something created by another worldly entity.

The district court held that the Book was copyrightable. However, if the court erred in this regard, we need not reach the other issues in the case.

The copyrightability issue is not a metaphysical one requiring the courts to determine whether or not the Book had celestial origins. In this case, the belief both parties may have regarding those origins, and their claim that the Book is a product of divine revelation, is a matter of faith, and obviously a crucial element in the promotion and dissemination of the Book. For copyright purposes, however, a work is copyrightable if copyrightability is claimed by the first human beings who compiled, selected, coordinated, and arranged the Urantia teachings, "in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship." 17 U.S.C. § 101 (defining a "compilation"). See also 17 U.S.C. § 103 (providing that compilations are copyrightable). Those who were responsible for the creation of the tangible literary form that could be read by others, could have claimed copyright for themselves as "authors," because they were responsible for the revelations appearing " 'in such a way' as to render the work as a whole original." Feist, 499 U.S. at 358, 111 S.Ct. at 1294 (referring to the statutory definition of compilation).

The Supreme Court in Feist, supra, held that the white pages of the plaintiff's telephone directory did not qualify for copyright protection, because there was nothing original about listing names of the area's telephone subscribers in alphabetical order. Yet Feist also recognized that a compilation of facts may possess the requisite originality when the author chooses which facts to include, in what order to place them, and how to arrange the data so that readers may use them effectively. Feist simply reaffirmed what the statute provides and what had been known since The Trade-Mark Cases, 100 U.S. 82, 25 L.Ed. 550 (1879) and Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, 111 U.S. 53, 4 S.Ct. 279, 28 L.Ed. 349 (1884): that copyright protection only extends to those components of the work...