If You Quote the Pope, It’ll Cost you
This has got to be a prime example of how not to garner favor.
Reports Guardian Unlimited:
"A row has broken out in Rome about whether the speeches and writings of Pope Benedict should be freely available to everyone or subject to copyright.
The dispute was prompted by revelations that a publishing house in Milan had to pay £10,000 to reprint 30 lines from the first speech by the Pope following his election in April, after the Vatican transferred copyright on papal texts to its own publishing house, Libreria Editrice Vaticana. The Vatican also plans to charge rights on any papal texts of the past 50 years."
According to The Australian:
"Under the Vatican’s new copyright rules, publishers will have to negotiate a levy of between 3per cent and 5per cent of the cover price of any book or publication ‘containing the Pope’s words’.
Those who infringe the copyright face legal action and a higher levy of 15per cent….
A Vatican spokesman said the Holy See had to defend itself against ‘pirated editions’. The move is also aimed at ‘premature publication’. Journalists accredited to the Vatican are handed papal texts under embargo. The Vatican said that if embargos were broken in future not only would the journalist face sanctions but also their publication would face legal action….
Officials said newspapers would be free to publish extracts from papal documents without charge once they were officially released, but only by ‘prior agreement’. The rules cover not only encyclicals — the most authoritative papal pronouncements, issued in Latin — but also the Pope’s homilies at his weekly audiences on Wednesdays, and his addresses at Angelus prayers on Sundays."
Not surprisingly, there’s been some criticism about this newest pronouncement.
According to Vittorio Messori, who co-authored Crossing the Threshold of Hope with Pope John Paul II and Ratzinger Report: An Exclusive Interview on the State of the Church with Pope Benedict, then Cardinal Ratzinger:
"The Church is an organisation that exists to spread the word of God and levying a duty on those words, putting a smell of money on it, seems to me to be a very negative thing."
He also stated:
"This is wholly negative and absolutely disastrous for the Vatican’s image….[to] cash in, in this way, surrounds the clergy with the odour of money".
David Bollier of On the Commons has an interesting post about this topic here.
(Photo of Pope from CBC News, AP Photo/Domenico Stinellis)
