June 12, 2000

Dear Friends;

Here is a quick rundown of recent changes made to the website which may affect our response to the Foundation. These changes were made after reviewing the Foundation's latest complaint. It is apparent that they are not viewing some of the changes which have been made. They probably don't know about clearing their browser cache prior to viewing to be certain they are viewing the most recent version of each page in question.

Also, this initial response will not be as detailed as the response I sent you related to their first complaint. Many of the comments I made in that response are still relevant.

Scanning through their document of June 10, 2000 and noting relevant issues:

Translations -- Partial translations have been moved to a webspace which requires registration and acknowledgement of copyright by users. Over time we can work to present these as study aids, comparative works, etc., rather than "translations." We should work to keep these within a defensable fair use boundary.

They've complained about a modified table of contents for the Spanish text -- how can they claim a copyright infringement for something to which they do not have a copyright? If we acknowledge their copyright per our license agreement, on what basis can they complain if we provide a unique indexing system or our own table of contents to provide points of entry into the text?

Inferior quality of the Portuguese translation -- this is a subjective judgement call. This is the wording which Luis Carlos Dolabella, their Portuguese translator, uses to describe Ana Maria's Portuguese translation. However, without a single exception, people I visited with in Brazil said they preferred Ana Maria's translation by a wide margin. Readers said that Luis' translation adhered so closely to a word-for-word replication of the English that a great deal of meaning was lost in the subsequent phrasing. Ana Maria's translation, on the other hand, was appreciated for its expression of the ideas in the English but in a much smoother literary phrasing than that of Luis. Indeed, the mechanical attempt to replicate the English word-for-word is a criticism I've heard from Spanish readers as well who lament the poor literary quality of the result. I think this attempt to replicate the English as exactly as possible is reflective of Seppo's philosophy of translation.

Solicitation for translators -- Please provide a URL. I have been unable to find any such solicitation. Translator's contract has been removed from the website per Foundation request. (This contract effectively usurps all rights granted to translators under international copyright conventions and requires translators to sign any future documents on which the trustees may request their signature.)

Editorial changes made to the text itself -- Please be specific. As far as I know there have been no editorial changes to the text. In fact, a great deal of work has gone into the attempt to exactly reproduce the 1955 edition.

Pop-up notes -- these are not embedded in the text. These are hyperlinks to external documents. To claim that the inclusion of
hyperlinks in a copyrighted work is a copyright infringement would be a radical claim indeed, given the state of the Internet where such hyperlinks are at the very heart of the medium.

Italics in ascii text -- The Foundation's request is not technically feasible. Anything inserted into the ascii text to indicate italics would create a substantial interference with the reading of the text. This is not unlike the inability to reproduce italics in the Foundation's audio version of the text.

Their criticism of our reference system -- It is not clear to me how the inclusion of the reference numbers is a copyright infringement. Exactly what is covered by copyright needs to be clarified. The Fair Use provisions of the copyright laws encourage the addition of features to a text which will facilitate study and scholarship.

Display of material under protective order -- They need to be specific. Give us the URLs of the offending documents and I will try to track down the source. I do not have sources noted in specific documents but may be able to remember where they came from just by looking at them. To my knowledge there are no documents on the website covered by such a protective order.

Trademarks -- I notice that, while the word "Mars" is a registered trademark, "The Mars Society" has a website at http://www.marssociety.org; the title of the website contains the word "Mars" and they also have the word in their metatags. Our website contains numerous notices that it is unaffiliated with Urantia Foundation. It whould also seem significant in this regard that we are not engaged in any commercial activity related to our use of the word "Urantia."

The Illustrated Urantia Book -- A copyright notice has been added to the index page for this section of the website; the name of the section has been changed from "The Illustrated Urantia Book" to "Illustrations for The Urantia Book."

As of the present moment, the "popups" have been removed from the text. However, this has nothing to do with the Foundation's complaint and is only temporary. They have been removed because there is considerable work being done on the text files at present.

I would be glad to write explanatory paragraphs for the group's response if this would be helpful. In particular, I could write several paragraphs explaining why the Foundation's proposal to have one text online to which everyone links is not technically feasible.

I've changed the listing on the page for ordering The Urantia Book to include a link to their website which will hopefully help them not to be so confused. This is at: http://urantiabook.org/bookshop/urantiabooks.html

I toyed with the idea of putting a notice at the bottom of every web page saying that we were unaffiliated with Urantia Foundation. But it gets really obnoxious reading all these notices and forces the user's consciousness to awareness of organizational conflict rather than the content of the material they're reading.

Every page which references our Urantianet service contains a notice that we are unaffiliated with Urantia Foundation.

All concentric circles symbols contain a note that they represent the Paradise Trinity except for those appearing on reproductions of early historical correspondence prior to their registration as trademarks.

Multiple translations of the Spanish Foreword which have been provided for comparative studies have been removed from the Spanish table of contents and put in a section on study aids.

The home page for the website and the major index pages contain notices that we are unaffiliated with Urantia Foundation.

The animated "Urantia" has been removed from the website even though it included a note that "Urantia is the name of our Planet."

TDA: I am still of the opinion that the readership community should be as informed as possible on this situation. I feel strongly that whatever course is choosen in this matter it must be chosen by an informed community.

Thank you again for the many hours of work you've put in on this to help us keep legal in the face of these increasingly strident and frequently unreasonable demands.

David