March 26, 2000

This material is confidential to the members of the Executive Committee. It is provided for background information, not as arguments for use in the upcoming meeting with Georges and his team. I would prefer to give them as little information as possible about our plans, goals and strategies.

Dear Friends;

As you are preparing to meet with representatives from Urantia Foundation regarding issues related primarily to the website, I thought it might be helpful to review the current website as it relates to some of the complaints we've received regarding infringement of copyrights and trademarks

It should be remembered that the website is a work in progress. At present it is quite far from that set of documents, tools and relationships which I envision as constituting a more mature stage of development. There are four primary areas of development.

1. The creation and maintenance of a readership knowledge base: An archive of all relevant documents, photographs, recordings, etc. The purpose of this is to provide open access to historical processes, readership thought and reader-developed study aids. There are currently over 2,000 documents in this collection with many more in process of being scanned and formatted.

2. The creation and maintenance of a Urantia Book study center: This includes translations, indexes, the Paramony, cross-reference guides, links to source materials, and other tools. The purpose of this is to facilitate comprehensive study of The Urantia Book and higher quality translations of the text and significant secondary works.

3. The ongoing development of Internet communication resources: This includes email systems, private collaborative study services, conferencing services, file archiving, etc. The purpose of this is to facilitate communication among readers and to foster and support the development of local and regional social infrastructure.

4. The development of online administrative tools and resources: The purpose of this is to facilitate geographically de-centralized, online management of readership business affairs. Much of the initial infrastructure for this is in place awaiting related administrative changes.

The matters regarding which Urantia Foundation has complained are almost exclusively related to item 2 above. Therefore I will confine my comments to this one area of our endeavor.

The primary task for the next few years is to migrate every translation of The Urantia Book into a database. Requests for documents will go to this database and the related paragraphs of the text will be returned to the user, formatted into a document for screen display "on the fly" -- that is, the actual document will not be stored anywhere unless the user decides to retain a copy. The text of the book itself will exist only as sentences and paragraphs in a database. This will be true of every translation. This system will make it possible to easily compare any paragraphs of any translation side-by-side in adjacent windows on a computer screen. In addition, it will enable automated integration of important secondary works (such as the Paramony) with each translation. We're in the process of creating templates which will make it easier to provide texts in process with the Paper:Section.Paragraph numbers.

I intend for this database to include multiple translations in a given language. For example, we currently display (as a set of documents) the current Foundation Spanish text. But we are working on the formatting and checking of the original El Libro text so that we can publish that as well and make any selected paragraph available in a window adjacent to the identical paragraph in the other translation. (It is currently possible to compare different Spanish versions of the Foreword). Likewise, the Weiss translation is being formatted so that it may be compared with the current Foundation French work. This should be a great help to translators, persons preparing study aids, and non-English readers seeking more coherent meaning in the translation they are using as their primary text.

This should also provide a basis for developing useful word lists for individuals creating secondary works, commentary or study aids. The text itself will become a hypertext document and an index to its source materials. Every term in The Urantia Book which corresponds to a listing in Harry's index will become a hyperlink which will provide immediate access to related regions of the text. For example, clicking on the term "unqualified absolute" in this hypertext version of The Urantia Book will display a small window containing all the listings from Harry's index for "unqualified absolute" allowing the reader to easily click through these references. The Paramony and our online Biblical texts will likewise be directly linked into the text of The Urantia Book.

By storing these texts as databases rather than as documents, we will be able to more easily serve them out to users in a variety of formats, from those appropriate for web browsers, to those which might be used by anything from text-to-speech converters to display screens on Internet enabled cellular devices. I suspect that Georges and team do not think about The Urantia Book as anything other than a book -- an artifact to be preserved as such in perpetuity; I suspect also that they view the Internet as simply another place to display the pages of the book.. The world of hypermedia is a very different place . . .

Our database will also provide easy retrieval of source materials for any given paragraph (for which sources have been identified). The English text in this database could serve as our reference text -- the primary text which we maintain and from which all other copies are derived. At present, this reference text is the Uversa Press text. We have gone over it and restored all changes to their original state using the various lists of changes which are available. It is probably far from perfect and has formatting errors we are still finding. But it is the website's reference text and we will continue to try and perfect it. Of course all of this is very work intensive. It takes many weeks to make even a cursory pass through the text in one language and creating the software tools necessary for some of these other tasks is not a trivial undertaking; this is a long-term project.

As you might well imagine, the universal adaptation of the Paper:Section.Paragraph numbering scheme is an essential indexing and cross-referencing tool in this effort. The Foundation's Portuguese translator told me that he finds these numbers essential for keeping his work in order. He expressed annoyance at the fact that he is required to strip them out of any work which he submits to the Foundation.

I trust that the above comments might help you appreciate why we need to have our own copies of the text and not simply provide links to a photographic reproduction of the book resident on Urantia Foundation's web server. In addition, by having our own text and being free to format and store it as we see fit, we can make it much easier for people to access the text over the Internet -- enhanced download times and formatting which facilitates the passage of the electronic text through the many devices constituting the path to distant areas of our world.

Current complete translations on the website:

English
Spanish
French

Russian (nearing publication)

Current partial translations on the website:

Portuguese

German

Russian

Croatian

Korean

Spanish (Sanchez-Escobar translation, Seville, Spain, 1997-2000)

Spanish (Planeta Publishing excerpts derived from Benitiz translations, Barcelona, Spain, 1990)

I do not have a well-established criteria governing the publication of these materials because I do not fully understand the legal situation regarding them. In general I have tried two different approaches:

1. Publish only a few papers of a particular translation so that the percentage of published material relative to the whole remains small. This has its drawbacks. The primary way in which we build traffic through the website is by providing a variety of materials on a variety of topics. This creates a situation in which we can maximize the number of references in Internet search engines which point to The Urantia Book. For example, if you go to Altavista and put "Neanderthal races" into their search engine, chances are good you will find a Urantia Book reference in the first few listings returned. This is a mechanism we are trying to exploit whereby individuals will find The Urantia Book in the context of specific information for which they are seeking. By only publishing a few of the papers of a translation, we limit the number of possible key words which might lead people to the book. One way around this is to put all the papers on our web server but only list a few in the index. This is the current state of our German translation. If you look in our index you will only find a few papers listed. But if you go to a German search engine, the full range of available keywords will point to the text because it is actually on our server. It is simply out of view of more general indexing mechanisms.

It is also possible to simply rotate papers -- have only 3 or 4 visible at any one time in the indexes but rotate them so that over a given period of time, all available papers would be exposed.

2. Require user registration and password access. This creates a context of an on-line educational resource. This has drawbacks as well, as it requires user registration and discourages easy discovery by individuals surfing for information.

It is indeed a shame to have to take such measures with an epochal revelation so desperately needed by the peoples of our world.

Trademark issues:

Tonia has complained about the animated "Urantia" which is at http://urantiabook.org/index_studygroup_database.htm. The Foundation's "Safe Harbor" provisions for reader use of the word "Urantia" includes artistic renderings of the word. I'm not sure what Tonia's gripe about this might be.

Our "RealName" registration of the word "Urantia" as an Internet key word: If you go to Altavista -- http://www.altavista.digital.com -- and put the word "Urantia" into the search box, you will find at the top of the return set the following:

urantia^RN - Click on this Internet Keyword to go directly to the urantia Web site.

Over two years ago, I registered our website with this service. Georges recently complained about this registration so I suspect it will be on his list. Our website is associated with this key word in MicroSoft's database as well. (Some unknown person has registered "Urantia" as an AOL key word). These registrations help generate traffic for the website and are quite important. From a trademark standpoint we probably couldn't defend our use of it. But I would not want to simply give it over to the Foundation because we have over two years of work in building traffic by using it. Also, this is related to the use of the word "Urantia" in web page "meta tags keywords". If you go to our home page at http://urantiabook.org and in your browser click "view" on the menu bar and then "source", you will see the code which displays this page in your browser. Near the top you will see several lines which begin with the word "meta" and one which includes the term "keywords". The various search engines for the Internet read these lines which begin with "meta" to learn about the page they represent. These "keywords" are the entries under which the search engines index pages. Georges has implied in one of his complaints that he might consider our use of the word "Urantia" in these meta tags as a violation of their trademark. Our inability to associate our web services with the word "Urantia" would be a serious setback for our effort. I think we should be very careful here and not yield any ground without additional consultation.

Tonia has complained about the term "Urantianet" which we use to refer to our email newsletter which now goes out to over 1,000 subscribers. I have also registered the terms "Urantiaweb" and "Urantialink" as domain names for future uses. Each page on which this term appears contains a note stating that we are unaffiliated with Urantia Foundation. I have also included notes at several places in the site to the effect that "Urantia" is the name of our planet.

I think the foregoing covers the basics of where we stand relative to copyright and trademark issues. Here are a few random notes which I've collected while thinking about this meeting.

My personal sources of information indicate that there are two arguments being presented to the Georges/Tonia axis which are acting to restrain their ideological extremism. These are apparently being highlighted by Travis Binion and are being reinforced by other trusted supporters.

1. Loss of power due to civil disobedience: The argument here is that if policies are too restrictive, they will result in significant civil disobedience, the end result of which will be a further loss of credibility and power.

2. The many-headed hydra scenario: The argument here is that if the Foundation comes down too heavily on the Fellowship, a number of the key individuals may simply go their own way and start their own independent efforts. As long as the Fellowship exists, there is one organization which they can attempt to control. If they significantly damage it, they assure the replication of multiple versions, creating a situation impossible to control with further loss of credibility and power.

One of the approaches Georges is pushing is that of having Urantia Foundation be the only organization allowed to have the text on a web server, requiring everyone else on the internet to link to their text. This would involve revoking existing "website" licenses. This would include a revocation of Jesusonian's license to have the text on their website.

Tonia has complained about the pop-up windows for the display of the text which I intend to eventually have inplemented throughout the website. For example, take a look at my study guide for "How Jesus Taught" which is at http://urantiabook.org/archive/studyaid/how_jesus_taught.htm -- click on any one of the references and that reference immediately pops up in a small window. It is not clear to me why this is objectionable. This displays the relevant portion of the text but the little window can be expanded and if you explore it, you will find that the entire text is available.

"Urantia" as an Internet key word: At present, this keyword leads to the Fellowship website. If there is any disagreement about it, it will become a generic keyword pointing to no site in particular. For example, go to Altavista and put in the phrase "Christian books" (with quote marks) -- then click on the "Christian books" keyword which appears at the top of the return set. What you get is a specialized listing of everyone who has used "Christian books" as a keyword. This means that Urantia Foundation would find their website listed on a similar page next to Pierre's website, Norm Du Val's website, the Aquarian Concepts website, and others. I don't think they want to do this.

Urantia Foundation's efforts to control translations has not stopped the production of "unofficial" translations -- it has merely driven the process underground. I am personally aware of 4 different -- and viable -- translation efforts currently underway in Spanish. By publishing partial translations on the website we are attempting to bring these folks into contact with each other so that these efforts can benefit by wider collaboration and sharing of ideas. We have noted that in the case of both Portuguese and Spanish translations, Urantia Foundation translators have utilized portions of our partial translations. While we are glad to share this information, we would prefer to have Foundation translators participating in this more open community. The concealing of word lists and hiding of translations only assures that these essential materials will be developed elsewhere and via the electronic medium come into more general use than those developed by Urantia Foundation and restricted to print media.

An example of the unfortunate repercussions of Foundation approaches is what happened this past month to a group of Portuguese readers working on a translation of Part IV. They were using our public bulletin board, "El Foro" as a means of communicating about this and seeking a broad range of opinions on terms used in the translation. Foundation zealots literally drove them out with threats and harrassments for working on "unofficial" translations and being tools of Caligastia. These readers are currently reorganizing themselves on a private web-based bulletin board system. Again, the Foundation is not going to stop these activities -- they are simply driving them underground. There are apparently 4 study groups in Buenos Aires who don't want themselves advertised because they want to avoid attracting the attention of the local Foundation representative. Foundation representatives also use our public discussion lists as a way of getting email addresses of people in their areas and then writing to them trying to enlist their support for the Foundation. We have done nothing to directly counter this but it is a very annoying reality and is responsible for the ongoing seeding of conflict between reader groups throughout Latin America.

The Foundation has stated in the past that partial and multiple translations are a source of "confusion." I don't see how anything could be more confusing than their current Spanish translation which has the Foreword in a different translation than the portion of the text which it is intended to illuminate; this is the same edition which uses three different terms to refer to Christ Michael and multiple terms for "bestowal."

It might be nice to ask how they think our activities are causing them harm. My understanding is that this would be an essential element of any legal case they might press against us.

It would also be interesting to hear from them just what they consider as constituting "the inviolate text" -- which text? Which printing?

I hope this is helpful. Please feel free to contact me with any specific questions or issues you might have.

David