In places where religion is officially recognized, can they give any human or group of humans a copyright over religious scriptures?

Question

EG in Jordan let's say, and you have the idea to translate the Quran into Ithkuil or Navajo or something like that, can a court actually give them copyright if by the law of Jordan, God is officially recognized as the sole author of the Quran and presumably have all rights that could exist over how it is used.

Answer 1

Yes.

The government can grant legal rights to anyone it wants for whatever reason it wants.

Unlike the Quran, nobody claims that copyright statutes or similar legal rights are a product of the word of God. They are human inventions that are tools to achieve practical economic goals.

In almost every case, even under ordinary mainstream copyright jurisprudence, the original text is in the public domain anyway, so the issue is not the original author, the issue is the copyright in the human translation (excluding any rights to the underlying source text and any other works that are derivative of the underlying source text).

Some countries even allow limited copyright-like rights in translations of public domain texts that have not been translated in to that country's language, in order to give translators and publishers an incentive to continue to translate books that are unavailable to its citizens, or give limited patent-like rights in a generic drug. This concept is similar to giving a postal service a monopoly on delivering letters. Sometimes a monopoly is necessary to make it economically viable to produce works that are in the public domain.

For example, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has an Unapproved Drugs Initiative awards three years of market exclusivity to manufacturers who conduct studies of older, off-patent drugs that can allow them to be used for new classes of patients, or for off-label medical conditions different from those for which the off patent drugs were originally approved by the FDA.

Alternative, a country certainly could give some religious organization or foundation a copyright over a sacred text as an agent of "God".

For example, while no one has a copyright on the Rig Veda, in India, real property and religious icons at Hindu temples are nominally titled in the name of the god that the Hindu temple is dedicated to, and practically speaking, entrusted to the high priest in charge of that temple who uses any revenue from worshipers associated with the use of the real estate and religious icons titled in the name of that god for the benefit of the temple's operations and charitable commitments.

Likewise, in New Zealand, some rivers are given legal personality in the name of the river to assert legal rights that could generate revenue, that are used by a trustee of the river for the benefit of the river.

It would hardly be a stretch for a country like, for example, Jordan or Saudi Arabia, to grant a copyright in the Quran that it could manage for some religious purpose, like using royalties from the sale of it in book and paper form available on the Internet, or maintain a library/museum that preserves and displays the oldest known copies of it.