Can You Copyright A Planet?
NASA has just released pictures from their MESSENGER (Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging) probe. Among them was this one:
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
According to NASA:
The unnamed crater (52 kilometers, or 31 miles, in diameter) in the center of the image displays a telephone-shaped collapse feature on its floor.
Well, that is a very odd-shaped telephone. To me, it looks more like a letter C in a circle: ©. Yes, it would appear that Mercury is under copyright.
One explanation is of course that God has decided to protect His intellectual property. This is certainly something that God might do, just to avoid other people recreating the planets and becoming God in their own right. The only people who would ever recreate the planet would be the Magratheans, but that is another tale entirely. Furthermore, if you were God, would you have chosen to copyright Mercury, out of all of these planets? Mercury is, it must be admitted, fairly boring when compared to Earth. There is no life out there or anything, and it’s a pretty dull colour. Then again, perhaps there is a hidden copyright symbol on Earth, and on each of the other planets.
Another possibility is that NASA sent the probe out there to claim copyright. There are a few issues here. If God designed the planets then NASA would need to wait until after his death, and even then would not be able to copyright it. If the Big Bang is to blame then surely Mercury should be “open source”, having had no designer?
We shall see how this develops. However, to be on the safe side, I’ll make sure I don’t recreate Mercury any time soon.