Review of the April Urantia Foundation meeting
Prepared by Dan Massey for the General Council
and TDA delegates

Several weeks ago, Janet asked me to provide you with a brief summary of our ongoing discussions with Urantia Foundation representatives. Here, at last, is that summary:

On 8-9 April, we (Marilyn Kulieke, Stever Dreier, Marvin Gawryn, and myself) met with a group of Foundation representatives (George DuPont, Seppo Kanverva, Tonai Baney, Nancy Schaeffer, and Steve Hill) at the Ambassador West hotel in Chicago.

The first day of the meeting was devoted to a review of a (roughly) 700 page document the Foundation had prepared outlining the basis they felt existed for litigation against the Fellowship for copyright and trademark infringement. They did not say that they intended to launch such litigation, only that they felt the body of evidence they had gathered showed why they felt such litigation would not be frivolous.

The 700 page document consisted of copies of material from the Fellowship's web pages and publications, organized under twenty tabs, each of which was associated with a relatively brief tag line about the nature of the problem. The Foundation representatives verbally added a 21st item to the list, namely a complaint about the use of their "common-law trademark" "The Urantia Book" in the name of "The Urantia Book Fellowship".

1. Some identified specific instances in which the Fellowship failed to provide appropriate copyright notice, per our website license or copyright conventions.

2. Some raised significant issues affecting the relationships between the organizations, such as their challenge to The Fellowship's right to its name and their desire to unilaterally change the terms of the website license.

3. Some were clearly the product of misunderstandings on the part of Foundation staff concerning web technology and/or the organization of our website.

4. Some expressed opinions of Foundation staff that did not seem especially germane to anything in particular except that they indicated a basis for antipathy towards the Fellowship.

Although each point was discussed in some detail, the broad theme was that the Foundation felt that the website license had not been drawn with sufficient care to protect their interests and that aspects of Fellowship behavior under the license were not consistent with normally expected duties of a licensee. Since many of their issues were not matters of law or license, they also made frequent reference to things they did not consider to be "ethical". It was repeatedly asserted that the Fellowship's behavior showed a systematic attempt to generate confusion with the authorized services and products of Urantia Foundation in the public mind and to usurp their role in the community.

The second day of the meeting was devoted to more general discussions, including personal reactions of individual members of the Fellowship team to the Foundation's presentation. Generally, I would say we tried to get information about the intent of this entire situation and to clarify the situation regarding the Foundation's implicit agreement for the Trustees to meet formally with Fellowship representatives. The Foundation representatives specifically denied that they sought to terminate our website license. They also specifically denied that their problems would be resolved by dissoloution of the Fellowship.

The attitudes of the Foundation representatives varied from extreme intransigence (every complaint is a legitimate and actionable matter) to a desire to horse-trade (if you fix some of these things we'll agree that the rest aren't a problem). I did not get the feeling that they had an especially unified position about what it all meant, except they were unhappy about a lot of things and wanted them to change so they could stop being unhappy about them. The idea that their unhappiness might originate within themselves and with their (to us) peculiar system of beliefs ABOUT the book, rather than in the acts of the Fellowship was incomprehensible to them.

At the end of the discussion, Steve Dreier made a separate presentation in which he attempted to interest them in recent discoveries concerning the origin of much of the conceptual content of the book from summarizations of major theological writings of the first half of the 20th century, most of which are likely still under copyright.

You will recall that our team was not empowered to negotiate on behalf of the Fellowship. From this meeting I took away these major points:

1. The Foundation wants to regain or establish complete and absolute control of the Internet presentation of ANY translated material from The Urantia Book. There was much discussion of the Foundation's desires and methods and the possible advantages we, as individuals, thought a more flexible approach would bring to the process of translation and study in languages other than english.

2. The Foundation has begun this spring, for the first time in its history, to claim that the name of The Urantia Book is one of its trademarks. Foundation representatives indicated that the Foundation intends to seek a Federal registration for "The Urantia Book" as a trademark.

3. The Trustees will live up to their obligation to meet with the Fellowship to discuss major matters of mutual interest to the organizations

During the month that passed after this meeting, the team members discussed the Foundation's concerns among themselves and, chiefly, with David Kantor, as manager of our Internet presence. As a result of these discussions, certain specific errors in adherence to the license were corrected. An attempt was made in our response to correct Foundation misapprehensions in certain areas. Finally, in a few areas the team did not deem critical to our mission or website function, we offered to initiate changes even though we believed the Foundation might have been educated to realize that its fears and interpretations were groundless.

We could not, of course, address matters impinging on points 1 and 2 above nor could we specify the subjects that might be appropriate to address in a meeting with the Trustees.

viewpoints. We endeavored to rise to this standard, although, speaking only for myself, I found the Foundation's perspective on what was important enough to the revelation to justify having nine people, including an Atlanta lawyer, spend two days in discussions in Chicago, dashed any hope I might have previously held for the constructive short-term evolution of the social structure of the revelation--at least as it involves the established organizations.

I have provided this brief and personal summary because I know that not all of you are equally interested in or entertained by these matters. On request, I can provide you with a copy of our team's written response to the Foundation's issues. This includes a cursory identification of the issues themselves. You will be required to endure an explanation of why this is a private document restricted to the Council members and what your responsibilities in handling it are before I will send it to you.

There are many significant details of our legal relationship with the Foundation that I have not attempted to summarize in this note and that will not be clear, even after reading our response. I do not plan to answer questions from individual councilors directly about this meeting; however, I'll collect your inquiries and try to expand on matters that seem of special interest in a couple of weeks.

It is likely that Steve, Marilynn, and Marvin will want to add their own perspective to these matters, since I have surely focused on things that seemed important to me and left a lot of other stuff out.