the Foundation’s trademarks. Upon discovering that Maaherra was responsible for this, the Foundation filed the instant suit in 1991. See Urantia Foundation v. Maaherra, 895 F.Supp. 1338 (D.Ariz.1995) (recounting this chronology).
This appeal is from the district court’s October 25, 1995 amended final judgment based on its February 10, 1995 order granting summary judgment to Maaherra on the Foundation’s copyright infringement claim. See Urantia, 895 F.Supp. at 1347.
DISCUSSION
Copyrightability of the Book
A threshold issue in this case is whether the work, because it is claimed to embody the words of celestial beings rather than human beings, is copyrightable at all. “To qualify for copyright protection, a work must be original to the author.” Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc., 499 U.S. 340, 345, 111 S.Ct. 1282, 1287, 113 L.Ed.2d 358 (1991) (citation omitted). The core statute, 17 U.S.C. § 102(a), provides:
[c]opyright protection subsists … in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, … from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.
17 U.S.C. § 102(a). “Original, as the term is used in copyright, means only that the work was independently created by the author (as opposed to copied from other works), and that it possesses at least some minimal degree of creativity.” Feist, 499 U.S. at 345, 111 S.Ct. at 1287 (citation omitted).
Maaherra claims that there can be no valid copyright in the Book because it lacks the requisite ingredient of human creativity, and that therefore the Book is not a “work of authorship” within the meaning of the Copyright Act. The copyright laws, of course, do not expressly require “human” authorship, and considerable controversy has arisen in recent years over the copyrightability of computer-generated works. See Arthur R. Miller, Copyright Protection for Computer Programs, Databases, and Computer-Generated Works: Is Anything New Since CONTU?, 106 Harv.L.Rev. 977 (1993). We agree with Maaherra, 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 infringing a copyright, that entity must have copied something created by another worldly entity.
The district court held that the Book was copyrightable. However, if the court erred in this regard, we need not reach the other issues in the case.
The copyrightability issue is not a metaphysical one requiring the courts to determine whether or not the Book had celestial origins. In this case, the belief both parties may have regarding those origins, and their claim that the Book is a product of divine revelation, is a matter of faith, and obviously a crucial element in the promotion and dissemination of the Book. For copyright purposes, however, a work is copyrightable if copyrightability is claimed by the first human beings who compiled, selected, coordinated, and arranged the Urantia teachings, “in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.” 17 U.S.C. § 101 (defining a “compilation”). See also 17 U.S.C. § 103 (providing that compilations are copyrightable). Those who were responsible for the creation of the tangible literary form that could be read by others, could have claimed copyright for themselves as “authors,” because they were responsible for the revelations appearing “ ‘in such a way’ as to render the work as a whole original.” Feist, 499 U.S. at 358, 111 S.Ct. at 1294 (referring to the statutory definition of compilation).
The Supreme Court in Feist, supra, held that the white pages of the plaintiff’s telephone directory did not qualify for copyright protection, because there was nothing original about listing names of the area’s telephone subscribers in alphabetical order. Yet Feist also recognized that a compilation of facts may possess the requisite originality when the author chooses which facts to include, in what order to place them, and how
