Allow me to propose a radical thesis: Copyright is fundamentally incompatible with Christian scholarship.

That statement ought to shake the tree trunk of our professional and academic work. Copyright is one of the safeguards of our academic profession;

many will say that without it, it isn’t clear how scholarship could continue.

But consider that we live in an era where our ideas (which are now called “intellectual property”) are under an increasing amount of legislative and judicial restriction. Recent legal movements such as lawsuits over media copyrights should cause us to wonder who owns our thoughts, or indeed, should anybody? As Christian scholars, we must oppose the very notion of copyright and marginalize it as a selfish and idolatrous temptation that is squeezing the life out of our work.

Copyright, to borrow a definition from the U.S. Copyright Office, is “a form of protection ... to the authors of ‘original works of authorship.’” This protection is available “to both published and unpublished works,” and it gives copyright holders the exclusive right to “reproduce the work in copies,” “prepare derivative works,” “distribute copies of the work to the public by sale,” and “perform [and display] the work publicly.”

At first glance, that all seems fine. After all, we’re quite used to the basic idea of copyright — no unauthorized reproduction of copyrightedmaterial and so forth. What’s the problem?

The problem is that copyright places restraints on both scholasticism and scholars; it locks ideas up under the ownership of particular people who are legally entitled to do whatever they want with it. Furthermore, any derivative use of copyrighted material must acknowledge — and frequently pay — for the right to use the original work.

In doing so, copyright denigrates the communal nature of scholarship. When our scholarship is done for the church, it is not a stretch to say that copyright denigrates the communal nature of Christian worship also.

The proper method — and the historical method — for Christian scholarship is for our work to be conducted by members of the body of Christ for the benefit and enjoyment of the rest of the body. Simply put, our work must serve Christ. This does not mean that attribution and citation go by the wayside — a quick glance through a historical theology book quickly dispels that idea. It simply means that attribution and citation aren’t barriers to distribution.

Copyright, however, introduces an artificial legal construction whose stated intention is to protect so-called “original works of authorship” from having their work unfairly attributed to or confiscated by another person. It follows from this that it also protects an author’s right to profit from the work’s distribution.

Given that, we can see little or no necessity for copyright, at least from a Christian perspective. The primary motivation of copyright is to protect two things: profit and pride. But neither of these are things that we ought to be racing to defend.

In the former case, the motive is plain enough: copyright gives its author the exclusive right to sell and profit from his/her work. We have no direct quarrel with this motivation; what we do quarrel with is the whether or not profit is enough of a motivation to restrict the distribution of ideas. Profit is undoubtedly the most driving force behind the legislative and judicial focus on copyright; the distribution of copyrighted material is, after all, a multi-billion-dollar industry.

But more than profit, copyright is an umbrella of protection for the ego. It is well and good that copyright affords its author royalties, but the real profit from copyrighting your work is getting to hear your name mentioned when the work is reviewed. What could feel better?

But let us step back and remember something: neither profit nor pride are at all interesting to a person who has been transfixed by “the weight of Glory,” as C. S. Lewis called it. Indeed, profit and pride ought to be two of the least interesting things to us. We care very little about the former, and we must absolutely hate the latter.

The latter problem — pride — is especially pernicious. Pride is that deadly sin that causes us to think, “It is I that am great. It is I that am mighty.” But John the Baptist reminds us, truly enough, “[Christ] must increase, but I must decrease.”

We have not yet reached the root of the problem of copyright to the Christian mind, however. The root of the problem is that our faith opposes the basic premise that copyright asserts.

Our objection to copyright is a denial of the implicit premise of “ownership” in copyright. Christianity asserts strongly and unequivocally that no human person owns his or her own thoughts. Our entire scholastic and intellectual endeavor is made possible solely by the grace of God — this is one of the fundamental tenets of our faith.

This assertion challenges the justification for copyright’s existence, namely that it affords legal protection for its creator, under the auspices that a person — a human being — owns his or her thoughts and is the genesis of them. Christianity — yesterday, today and

forever after — rejects this idea as a contemptuous idolatry. We know the real truth: it is the Divine Creator, not the human creator, to whom the credit and glory of our work is due.

Christians do not regard our good works as our own; indeed, how could we? We know all too well that humanity is terminally infected by the disease of sin, and that only the cure of God’s divine grace can remove the infection.

What does this all mean to us, practically speaking? Let us consider a simple but troubling example: the copyrighting of Scripture itself. Pick up the nearest contemporary translation of the Bible and turn to the publication page. It is there, in black ink, that we find these perverse words: “The Holy Bible. [Some version.] Copyright [some date] by [some publisher].”

The wrongness of this, both historically and theologically, should (I hope) be obvious. Have we come to the point where we think we “own” even the text of Scripture, or worse yet that it was us — rather than the hand of God working through us — that is responsible for its translation? Our Church Fathers would almost certainly have been outraged by the legal exclusion of Scripture. Indeed, we need not merely imagine this — early Protestants let loose with barely-contained rage against the aristocracy of the Roman church, which had made the enjoyment of Scripture an exclusive affair of the bishopric.

Yet when we assert copyright, we necessarily make the enjoyment of something exclusive. True, it can still be accessed and seen, but can it be distributed to a group of other people who can benefit from it? Can it be shown publicly for all to see? The laws and restrictions of copyright say “No.”

Doesn’t that seem terribly anti-scholastic? Indeed, doesn’t it seem terribly anti-evangelistic?

There are other problems with copyright that we could cite, including the problem in which we find ourselves to be bedfellows with secular causes like the music and movie industries that have adamantly — almost violently — defended copyright. Those industries have, over the past 20 years, successfully rewritten copyright laws in much of the world to give publishers and licensees (though curiously, not artists themselves) almost unlimited and eternal benefit to their copyrighted holdings. Is this who we want to be seen with?

Avoiding copyright of course raises questions about what the alternatives are. We can say succinctly that there are alternatives, including the public domain, Creative Commons licenses, and other alternative protections that keep the integrity of our work intact while ensuring that it stays free — both in terms of cost and in terms of freedom.

Ultimately, copyright makes assumptions that we cannot agree with and assertions that we cannot support. It is a difficult thing to divorce our minds from the idea of copyright, but in good faith, that is exactly what we must do.