At first glance, the relationship between copyright law and religion seems a curious subject for a book. Copyright is, after all, a secular legal right. In the USA at least it is grounded in the US Constitution's Patent and Copyright Clause: the Congress shall have power to ‘promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries’. So copyright is to promote the progress of science and useful arts – a right grounded in economics and incentives. Furthermore, the First Amendment to the US Constitution states: ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.’ One might therefore expect copyright in and religion to move in completely different legal spheres in the USA.

But that is not what this fascinating and learned book concludes. It explores how copyright law has been used by religious organisations in the USA not simply as an economic right but as a right to both organise and control such organisations. In fact there have been many copyright cases involving religious organisations in the USA, including the Church of Scientology, the Mormon Church, the Church of Christ, Scientist and Bikram Yoga. What this book does is to identify several significant copyright disputes that are explored in detail. These are the claimed angelic authorship of The Urantia Book, Mary Baker Eddy's use of copyright to construct the Christian Science Church, interdenominational disputes in the Worldwide Church of God, and the Church of Scientology's landmark lawsuits against Internet service providers in the 1990s – lawsuits which did much to help shape the current regulation of the Internet.

The approach taken is socio-legal and reflects trends in current copyright scholarship to focus on the creative communities that create (or to whom are revealed) copyright ‘works of authorship’ and to explore the interplay between religious faith and community values and copyright in the cases and judgments discussed. The book also grapples with the centrality of human authorship in copyright discourse – a challenge to religious organisations whose foundational texts are claimed to have non-human authors, writings channelled through a human or humans but not their creation in the first place. Assert your copyright in a work by God and the law will require you to prove title to your copyright, the ramifications of which are explored by reference to The Urantia Book. This inevitably means having to find some human authorship, even along the lines of a corporate author (a religious organisation generating or causing the work to exist). Immediately there is a conflict between the divine work and its authority as a religious text and how the secular law of copyright deals with such a work as literary property – inevitably stressing its human rather than divine creation.

What is clear from the book is that the US courts – and indeed on occasion the legislature – have been sympathetic to the use of copyright by religious bodies. The cases examined explore how copyright has been used not merely as an economic right (as a means of generating revenue for its owner) but as a way to preserve textual purity in religious/sacred texts, to produce religious community and to secure organisational authority. As the author comments at the start of the book, copyright (and other intellectual property rights such as trade marks and trade secrets) can help establish control of unchurched, non-traditional spiritual communities who lack a central, well-established controlling authority in an age where media access is all important and copyright can be used to control the access to and use of sacred works. Established churches may use canon law to regulate the use of sacred texts and control doctrinal adherence and maintain discipline, but in the main this is not how the organisations explored in the book have operated, although early on the Christian Scientists established a church by-law to ensure the founder's permission was sought when quoting her works – under threat of expulsion. Indeed, the Christian Scientists’ attempt through legislation to secure a form of perpetual copyright on their foundational text Science and Health through a 1971 federal law (overturned in 1985 as being unconstitutional), in order to ensure the integrity and textual integrity of the work, also has a resonance with the Crown privilege that still protects the Authorised Version (and the Book of Common Prayer) this side of the Atlantic.

This well-written, original and thoroughly researched book deserves a wide readership. Scholars of law and religion will find it a fascinating study of how the US courts have approached matters of religion through the lens of copyright law and its impact on the religious communities affected. Copyright lawyers will find its examination of the finer points of US copyright law has a surprisingly contemporary resonance. For a non-human author, what about a machine (and the author discusses how US copyright law has approached computer-generated works)? In addition, the Church of Scientology's early battles in the 1990s against Internet service providers and their role in disseminating online content considered infringing by the Church are not dead: the debate around the liability of intermediaries (online platforms these days) for hosting content put up by their users was revisited recently in the European Parliament in the passage of the EU's Digital Single Market Copyright Directive in 2019. Finally, the author reminds us that copyright is not just about economics. The first copyright system – printing privileges – had in England the control of heresy at its heart, and early copyright cases show that copyright has a long history as a means of censorship and control. It is not just there to sustain the printer's (and author's) economic rights in their works.