Page:Urantia Foundation v. Maaherra.pdf/5

 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 that are “original” to the “author”, and not to the facts themselves. Feist, 499 U.S. at 346–47, 350–51, 111 S.Ct. at 1288–89, 1290–91.

In this case, the Contact Commission may have received some guidance from celestial beings when the Commission posed the questions, but the members of the Contact Commission chose and formulated the specific questions asked. These questions materially contributed to the structure of the Papers, to the arrangement of the revelations in each Paper, and to the organization and order in which the Papers followed one another. We hold that the human selection and arrangement of the revelations in this case could not have been so “mechanical or routine as to require no creativity whatsoever.” Feist, 499 U.S. at 362, 111 S.Ct. at 1296. We conclude, therefore, that the “extremely low” threshold level of creativity required for copyright protection has been met in this case. See Feist, 499 U.S. at 345, 111 S.Ct. at 1287. [sic] (“The vast majority of works make the grade quite easily, as they possess some creative spark, ‘no matter how crude, humble, or obvious’ it might be.”) (quotation omitted).

It must be remembered that the claim of copyright infringement in this ease concerns the verbatim copying of the entire Urantia Book, including the selection and arrangement of the revelations into the Papers that comprise the Book. This case does not concern the use of a single “revelation” outside the context of the Book, which for purposes of this case would be analogous to a “fact,” and which of course would not be copyrightable. See Feist, 499 U.S. at 347, 111 S.Ct. at 1288–89.

This principle, the distinction between revelations as facts and the expression of these revelations, was recognized in a 1941 copyright infringement case that involved similar claims of divine authorship. Oliver v. Saint Germain Foundation, 41 F.Supp. 296 (S.D.Cal.1941). In Oliver, as here, the plaintiff’s religious text proclaimed that the facts contained in the text had come straight from a spirit, and that the spirit was the author of the history in the text. Id. at 297. In that case, however, the plaintiff (unsuccessfully) claimed copyright protection in the divine revelations themselves, and in the methods of spiritual communication, rather than in the plaintiff’s specific selection or arrangement of these divine revelations. The defendant in Oliver had not copied that arrangement and selection, but simply had written another text using the same divine “facts.” Id. at 299. The court in Oliver made it clear that, had the claim been that the selection and arrangement of the divine revelations had been infringed, the plaintiff’s copyright infringement claim might have had merit. Id.

Thus, notwithstanding the Urantia Book’s claimed non-human origin, the Papers in the form in which they were originally organized and compiled by the members of the Contact Commission were at least partially the product of human creativity. The Papers thus did not belong to that “narrow category of works in which the creative spark is utterly lacking or so trivial as to be virtually nonexistent.” Feist, 499 U.S. at 359, 111 S.Ct. at 1294 (citation omitted). Therefore, the Papers were works amenable to common law copyright protection, and the district court correctly so held.

The district court held that even though a common law copyright was created at the time the Papers came into being, the Foundation itself had not adequately shown that it owned that copyright in 1955, when it published the Book, so as to entitle it to claim the statutory copyright. Urantia, 895 F.Supp. at 1350–51, 1354. Because the district court was of the opinion that the Foundation had come into possession of the plates “serendipitously,” the court found that the Foundation had failed to establish how it had become the “proprietor” of the copyright in the Papers. Id. at 1354.