I was involved in a wee communication with God the other day, and He told me that actually I had it all wrong, that copyright and patent were wholly justified, had always had His holy blessing, and were pretty much in perfect accord with His almighty will. In fact, He said, He did have a couple of additional commandments that He hadn’t considered Moses would have been quite ready for at the time, but that He would happily pass on to me to convey to the world via my blog – noting that I must of course henceforth obey or face eternal damnation.

As you might expect, He still communicates via an archaic teletype in ‘all caps’, but here are His two commandments that relate to our holy inspiration for patent and copyright:

XI. THOU SHALT MARVEL AT ALL MY CREATION AND IN MY LIKENESS THOU TOO SHALT CREATE – THY DESIGN SHALL BE JOINED TO MINE AND ALL UPON EARTH THAT IS MADE IN ITS FORM SHALL BE SUBJECT TO THY WILL, FOR AS LONG AS THEE SHALL LIVE.

XII. THOU SHALT SCRIBE AND SHARE MY WORD, YET THOU MUST NOT SCRIBE, NOR SHARE AMONG A GATHERING, THE WORD OR GRAVING OF THY NEIGHBOUR WITHOUT HIS LEAVE, WHILST HIS BLOOD LAST.

So, there we have it. There are consequently quite a few ramifications for patent and copyright legislation.

Patent is thus supposed to last for the lifetime of the inventor, and is ‘first to invent’, not ‘first to file’. Moreover, it only applies to mortal creations, not the works of God, so at least DNA can’t be patented any more.

As for copyright’s term. This therefore endures until the author’s last remaining descendant dies (which could be a pretty long time, if not immeasurable). On the plus side, at least copyright is not permitted to apply to The Bible.

I did want to explore these ramifications with God a little further and query their feasibility, but unfortunately in a moment of white noise from a passing angel the carrier was lost…