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With copyright on religious works it is not always clear who the rights' holder is. Under the provisions of the Berne Convention, copyright is granted to the author on creation of the work. Several religions claim that all or some of their works were authored (written or dictated) by their god or gods. Many editions of the Bible are under copyright due to their unique edition or translation. In the United Kingdom, the King James Version of the Bible is covered by a crown copyright. ==''The Urantia Book''== In 1991 the Urantia Foundation sued Kristen Maaherra for reproducing parts of ''The Urantia Book'' unauthorized. According to the Foundation's representatives, the Papers of ''The Urantia Book'' were dictated by celestial, unseen cosmic beings to an unidentified sleeping subject (a human being) and they, The Urantia Foundation held the copyright in trust of keeping the text "inviolate". In resolving ''Urantia Foundation v. Maaherra'', the court said that "We agree with (defendant ), 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 copyright infringement, that entity must have copied something created by another worldly entity." Maaherra lost the case at this level, on the argument that the members of the receiving group had been given an original direction to the writings by selecting and formulating their questions, thus fulfilling the obligation of creative effort required to gain a copyright under U.S. law. This was later overturned on the grounds that the Urantia Foundation was not the author, and that the sleeping subject, sometimes highly controversially called a channeler, was legally considered the author, and that the Urantia Foundation thus could not file a valid copyright renewal. Four years later, in 1999, Harry McMullan III and the Michael Foundation published a book, ''Jesus–A New Revelation'', which included verbatim 76 of the 196 papers included in ''The Urantia Book''. McMullan and the Michael Foundation subsequently sought a legal declaration that the Urantia Foundation's US copyright in ''The Urantia Book'' was either invalid or, alternatively, that the copyright had not been infringed upon. Urantia Foundation's copyright was held to have expired in 1983 because the book was deemed to have been neither a composite work nor a commissioned work for hire. These two arguments having been rejected, a U.S. court held that, since the Conduit had deceased prior to 1983, only the Conduit's heirs would have been eligible to renew the copyright in 1983 and, since they had not done so, the Urantia Foundation's copyright on the book had expired and the book had therefore passed into the public domain. This decision was upheld on appeal. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Copyright on religious works」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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