Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Rebecca French, at UB Law, uses this case in her Property case as one of the many examples of how hard it is to come to grips with what constitutes property.

Property case -> Property course

WOW! Does that mean I can copyright Jesus and the Catholic church?

Rudy,

I'm not sure about copyrighting Jesus and the Catholic Church but I think you can get a franchise.

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Um... How is "What the Bleep" a recruiting tool for Ramtha? Ramtha isn't mentioned or alluded to once, and JZ Knight has equal or less screen time as the rest.

The claim about copyrighting Ramtha doesn't make sense. Perhaps you should go back to original sources and find out what is actually claimed rather rely on some web site article, before launching into the meme-of-the-week IP abuse rant.

The Ramtha _books_ can certainly be copyrighted by Ms. Knight. If at some point she writes "Ramtha the diety copyright 1975 J. Z. Knight," all that means is she doesn't know what she's doing. Copyright claims, unlike patents, are not examined by anyone and approved, so if someone, not understanding what copyright means and what is copyrightable, puts a copyright notice somewhere, it doesn't mean anything. Even registering a copyright just means you send something (a book, a picture) to the copyright and pay a fee. If you sent a picture of Ramtha and claimed to have copyrighted Ramtha, you would find out that all you have copyrighted is the particular image of Ramtha if challenged.

Sorn, before you get self-righteous you should probably do some checking yourself. The info (apparently) comes from an article by Kate Connolly in The Guardian, June 9, 1997:

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VIENNA -- A medium and author has won the sole right to "contact" a 30,000-year-old spirit.

Judy Z. Knight, an American, claims to have close spiritual ties with Ramtha, who she says has relayed messages to her since 1978.

But in September 1992, she claims, her psychic channel became ''disturbed'' by Judith Ravell of Berlin, who says she started contacting Ramtha about that time.

The legal battle has been dragged through Austria's courts for three years.

The country's supreme court has awarded copyright to Knight and ordered Ravell to drop her claim to be in contact with Ramtha...

...

The court told Ravell that her psychic interruption over the past five years had left Knight "hanging in spiritual limbo," and it ordered Ravell to pay $800 in damages. Knight's lawyers are looking for thousands more. Ramtha was unavailable for comment.

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http://www.apologeticsindex.org/r09.html

http://www.rickross.com/reference/ramtha/ramtha6.html

Unfortunately, the Guardian's online archives only go back to 1998.

Besides you make it sound as if relying on web sites and launching into meme-of-the-week IP abuse rants is a bad thing.

JOHO is not a fact-based blog.

The reason for "copyrighting god"--or in the specific case here, of copyrighting Ramtha--is to protect a particular perspective from misinterpretation/reinterpretation under the same name. Anyone can channel and/or claim a spiritual deity connection, but it is less confusing to the consumers of the information generated if there is a way to distinguish the various sources from one another.

The root issue here is that of the practice of co-opting the reputation and/or popularity of someone else's (god) perspective.