Update on Appeal
The Significance of
The Urantia Book's
Origins to a Court of LawRosey Lieske Agondonter Foundation 6/6/96
A Flurry of Briefs and Motions
At this point, the Foundation's opening brief on appeal, as well as Kristen's response and the Foundation's reply to her response have all been filed. These were followed by the Fellowship's motion to file an amicus brief and the amicus itself (which is invaluable in clarifying the role of the contact commission). The Foundation then filed their response to the amicus, to which the Fellowship filed a reply (which the Foundation then moved to have stricken). While the Foundation requested separately to add to the record on appeal, saying that Kristen raised issues in HER reply. Meanwhile the Fellowship has responded to the Foundation's request that their reply be stricken, saying that they may indeed reply and the Foundation has misread the rule. (Are you following all this?) And so it goes....
All of these briefs and motions have been filed, and with the exception of the Foundation's request to add to the record on appeal, have been referred to the judges hearing the case. With respect to the Foundation's request, the court permitted the filing of Kristen's whole deposition and denied the filing of any other documents requested.
Kristen's attorney, Joe Lewis, does not look for a ruling any earlier than the end of the summer. Unless new motions are filed, his own work should be done until it is set for oral argument. He's fairly sure it will be orally argued, probably in San Francisco.
Quick Sketch of Past and Present Arguments
To briefly review the Foundation's current arguments in the appeal, as well as understand the First Amendment issues still lying dormant at the heart of the matter, it might be a good idea to quickly review the case overall.
The Foundation's original claim was based on Dr. Sadler's patient (the contact personality) having authored The Urantia Book. Their ownership supposedly flowed from the patient's oral transfer of copyright to the Foundation. (A previous case having established that they had no written assignment of rights.) Beyond negating the entire idea that The Urantia Book is a revelation by spiritual beings, their claim that the patient wrote the book ran into additional difficulties when it came time to renew in 1983. The renewal provisions of the copyright act require that the author be alive at the time the renewal is issued. Another lawsuit had already established that the patient was no longer living.
Since he was deceased, only his wife or heirs would have had any legal right to renew. To do so, they were required to file before the expiration date of the original term, which of course they did not do. This caused The Urantia Book, as a matter of law, to lapse into the public domain in 1983.
As the present case developed, the Foundation abandoned the position that Dr. Sadler's patient wrote the book. Various and sundry approaches to establish a point of human origin then followed, all of which failed under examination. In the appeal, the focus has been on the contact commission as a human source for the book. Their lawyers, assert, through intense legal tangling, that it was the contact commission who provided the motivating factor in the creation of The Urantia Book, and at their "instance and expense" the Papers were created. It's then made muddily clear that somehow a group of celestial beings, interested in writing, came under the lucky influence of some human beings wanting serious questions answered for a book they were putting together.
If the contact commission had indeed directed, financed, and inspired the celestial authors, the Urantia Papers might legally be considered a "work for hire" and "compiled work" -- a compendium of information, like an encyclopedia, in which a number of writers submit articles requested by an employer, who then owns all rights to the book itself. So, the Foundation asserts that the contact commission did the work of submitting the vital questions and directives to their invisible "employees," and then compiled, revised, and expanded the responses into a manuscript that was given the Foundation at the time of their formation some twenty years later. Aside from the fact that there was no "manuscript" given the Foundation, but a set of printing plates, this argument flies in the face of all the submitted evidence -- even against much of their own. Yet this is the scenario they are submitting to the appeal judges.
The "Significance of Origins" in a Matter of Religion
The Foundation's is a hopeful argument, and it might fly--but it does seem like it's extraordinarily hard to maintain control over a book authored by celestial beings in the United States. No matter what legal logic they attempt to couch it in, the underlying reality of this transcendent origin pushes awkwardly past the parameters of secular law. Especially in a system which was uniquely designed to keep temporal law pertinent to temporal, or "external," matters only.
In the U.S., things of the inner life, or things of divine origin, are left outside the reach of human law. Purposely. This was decided at the very inception of our government in an effort to insure a separation between church and state, and guarantee us religious freedom. in the United States, a book of celestial origin (once the court merely acknowledges those origins-- it is purposely not equipped to sanction them) will translate eventually into a matter considered beyond its legal scope. Considered a matter of religion, governable by God alone. This is what our First Amendment guarantees us. (And this is why the Foundation has remained so doggedly determined to establish a point of human origin for the Urantia Papers. Human origin=Legal human control. Celestial origin=First Amendment protection/No legal human control.) It's that simple.
The foundation's true nemesis in attempting to maintain human control over this strange and beautiful book is fully discussed on pages 28-34 of Joe Lewis's (Kristen's attorney) reply brief in the appeal: Under U.S. law, you have to be a human author to claim copyright protection. These authors were not-- they were superhuman. This renders The Urantia Book, even being a "literary work" in vulnerable book form and fully recognizable English words, simply NOT copyrightable in the United States.
So far the real implications of the book's celestial origin in terms of our religious rights have only been minimally addressed, while the court deals with slowly unraveling a copyright claim based on the lie of human authorship. But nowhere in this process has any invention, any fiction of human authorship or ownership, been able to take root in upholding that claim to supersede the essential fact of the book's celestial origin. Nor has the Foundation, apparently willing to compromise the future viability of our book for the sake of their own legal empowerment, been able to remain a potent contender.
At every step, their legal position has become weakened--at every step, the transcendent origins of the revelation have come more to the fore and been, appropriately (according to our own national perceptions) neither "prohibited nor promoted" by law. We do live with certain innate protections here. If this case is pursued and pursued, up to the Supreme Court level, the extraneous factors clouding the Foundation's essential violation along the lines of religious freedom will eventually become stripped away--revealing a First Amendment issue, heart and soul. Human author alone would have resulted in a purely secular case.
Apparently there has been some confusion over Judge Urbom's ruling "against" Kristen on the First Amendment issue before his final decision. This decision, among several others, was done on the assumption of they copyright's validity. (It was part of a highly economic move, it seemed, to essentially clear the board of all issues but that of the copyright's validity.) He then ruled against its validity, which is the very ruling now on appeal. By doing so, the First Amendment issues remain intact, though still lying dormant at the heart of the case.