A response to Urantia Foundation regarding alleged copyright and trademark infringements on the website of The Urantia Book Fellowship

P.1740 - §2 [156:5.15] "As the days pass, every true believer becomes more skillful in alluring his fellows into the love of eternal truth. Are you more resourceful in revealing goodness to humanity today than you were yesterday? Are you a better righteousness recommender this year than you were last year? Are you becoming increasingly artistic in your technique of leading hungry souls into the spiritual kingdom?"

Background information for individuals reviewing website issues

It might be helpful to provide some background contextualization so that the specific responses to Urantia Foundation's expressed concerns which follow might be more fully understood.

In technical terms, one of the most basic operating principles governing the development of the website is that we have a duty to provide the inviolate text of The Urantia Book for access by the public. This means guaranteeing that the words of the original text, the paragraphs into which they are assembled, and their exact sequence will be accurately reconstructed by the medium of display. Since the text which the Declaration of Trust specifies be preserved inviolate is that which was contained on the original plates entrusted to Urantia Foundation, every effort has been made to make sure that the text as displayed on the website conforms to that which was contained on these original plates. The text provided on the web at urantiabook.org thus fully reflects the purposes and intent of those who drafted the Declaration of Trust, constituting an important source of support for the purposes for which Urantia Foundation was created.

This has resulted in two approaches to the electronic reproduction of the text: 1.) The entire original text is available as a photographic reproduction in pdf format and, 2.) A continuing effort is being made to assure that the web browser version of the text on the website conforms to this original, which the Declaration of Trust implies should be maintained free "from alteration, modification, revision, or change in any manner . . ." While it could be argued that this comment in Article 3.1 of the Declaration of Trust refers only to the maintenance of reference copies of the original text, The Urantia Book Fellowship's website acts on the side of conservatism and extends this apparent concern of the founders to apply to the text which is provided to the public via the website.

A distinction should be made between the preservation of the original text and its preservation in the form of a book, which would imply that the text should not be adapted to any other medium. That is, the injunction to preserve the text cannot be taken to apply to such secondary elements as the particular type face cast as part of the original plates. Urantia Foundation's audio tape version of the text provides a good example of preserving the original text while transferring its storage to a medium other than paper, to be reproduced by a machine other than a printing press. The hypertext environment of the web is yet another medium with its own unique requirements for formatting, storage and reproduction. We are providing the text in this new medium while retaining the sequence of words, sentences and paragraphs which constitute the original text.

In addition to certain statements on the public record made by Urantia Foundation trustees, Urantia Foundation's treatment of the Table of Contents over the years would lead to the conclusion that the Table of Contents does not constitute a part of the original text with whose inviolate preservation they are concerned. For example, Urantia Foundation's Folios reproduction of the text contains no Table of Contents at all while the Foundation's website version has a Table of Contents appropriately designed for access to the text via the web. It should also be noted that Urantia Foundation's web version of the text does not faithfully preserve even the paragraph structure of the original text--something which is of great significance to serious readers engaged in a study of source materials.

Because much of the design of The Urantia Book Fellowship's website is geared toward study of the book, the original paragraph structure of the text has been carefully preserved. In addition, we have restored the Paper:Section.Paragraph numbering scheme used by the Forum prior to publication. This has proven essential for accurate attribution of The Urantia Book paragraphs in the creation of study aids.

That the "inviolate" text is something which exists independently of the formatting demands of it's storage or reproduction medium is illustrated by the following reproduction of a portion of the supposedly "inviolate" text as taken from Urantia Foundation's website:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"><HTML><HEAD><TITLE>PAPER 42 - ENERGY--MIND AND MATTER</TITLE><META content=text/html;charset=iso-8859-1 http-equiv=content-type><META content="MSHTML 5.00.2919.6307" name=GENERATOR></HEAD><BODY aLink=red bgColor=white link=blue text=black <HR><P></P><H1>THE URANTIA BOOK</H1><H2>PART II - THE LOCAL UNIVERSE</H2></CENTER><P><HR>Page 467 <HR><P></P><CENTER><H2>PAPER 42 - ENERGY--MIND AND MATTER</H2></CENTER><P>The foundation of the universe is material in the sense that energy is the basis of all existence, and pure energy is controlled by the Universal Father. Force, energy, is the one thing which stands as an everlasting monument

demonstrating and proving the existence and presence of the Universal Absolute. This vast stream of energy proceeding from the Paradise Presences has never lapsed, never failed; there has never been a break in the infinite upholding.</P><CENTER><H3><A name="1. PARADISE FORCES AND ENERGIES"></A><STRONG>1. PARADISE FORCES AND ENERGIES</STRONG></H3></CENTER>

Clearly the text which we are concerned with preserving is independent of the characters inserted into the text to control formatting. Formatting the text for display on a web browser is controlled by settings within the browser software on the user's machine. These settings can take precedence over the author's specifications contained in formatting code such as that in the above paragraph. On most browsers these formatting factors may be controlled by the user--which font is used, its size, the margins of the page, etc. The only part of the process fully under the contol of the publisher is the sequence of words and spaces sent to the user.

This is similar to the situation which occurs with the use of Urantia Foundation's audio tapes of The Urantia Book. In this case the user also controls the way in which the text is reproduced -- loudness, varying amounts of bass and treble, even the speed of the tape may be controlled in some playback situations. Here also, that which is stored on the tape is only an analog of the original text, requiring interpretation and formatting by a machine for accurate reproduction.

Urantia Foundation's Folios version on CD is another example of the way in which the inviolate text may be formatted for reproduction in a medium other than that of a book. Here Urantia Foundation has completely omitted the Table of Contents. This version also contains an internal paragraph numbering scheme created by the software, inserted into but not part of the original text.

Current research suggests that The Urantia Book itself is merely an index to a vast collection of additional texts in the fields of philosophy, science and religion. Serving the needs of a growing readership during a phase of revelation development during which our understanding of the nature of the revelation itself is undergoing radical change cannot be accomplished with the same tools which served appropriately in the paper-text dominated information environment of 1950. Thus we are currently migrating the text into XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and WML (Wireless Markup Language) formats which contain even more coded insertions within the body of the text. WML technologies will force us to utilize even smaller file sizes than those for which we strive today -- single sentences stored in a database

Finally, it should be noted that there are strong currents of religious development present in the website activities of The Urantia Book Fellowship. Echoing sentiments contained in the mission statements of each of our organizations, the website exists to foster a religion "commensurate with Man's intellectual and cultural development . . ." The website of The Urantia Book Fellowship now contains examples of marriage ceremonies, funeral services, prayer circles, child dedication ceremonies and worship activities which are all based upon the text of The Urantia Book. This clearly indicates the evolution of The Urantia Book from a mere book to the status of a sacred text which forms the core religious document of a growing number of spiritually active men and women from a variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds around the world.

Urantia Foundation complaints regarding The Urantia Book Fellowship website

4/8/00

1. English version of UB text not as per Foundation=s Web site license policy:

1a. The text is not kept Ainviolate.@ (E.g., Uversa Press text; popup footnotes in text; commentary added to the index; first two papers not included in the index to Part IV. Copyright notice states, Aexcerpts . . . on this website have been transformed by the addition of an internal reference system designed to facilitate study, scholarship, and cross-referencing.@)

The ATable of Contents@ has been edited to include the first two papers of Part IV in the index to Part IV. Additional utility has been provided for readers in the form of links to footnotes regarding changes made to the text by Urantia Foundation from printing to printing. In addition, the Paper:Section.Paragraph system of notation used by the Forum prior to the publication of the book has been added to facilitate accurate attribution and reference in the creation of study aids. This notational scheme also includes page and paragraph references to Urantia Foundation print editions and is color-coded to clearly differentiate it from the body of the text.

As noted in the commentary above, observation of Urantia Foundation practice as well as the historic record would lead to the conclusion that the Table of Contents as it appears in the print version of The Urantia Book is not considered to be a part of the text whose integrity Urantia Foundation is attempting to preserve inviolate.

On The Urantia Book Fellowship website, the Table of Contents of The Urantia Book has been re-organized to optimize file size and thus facilitate its quicker transmission through the latency of the Internet experienced by users in distant regions of the world. This is not unlike Urantia Foundation's arbitrary re-organization of the contents of The Urantia Book to fit the pre-determined capacity of the cassette tapes used to store the audio version of the text.

While not of importance to the casual reader, the Forum numbering scheme is essential for any serious scholarship where precision in locating a particular paragraph is required or where accurate attribution of a source is desired. It is also important in the electronic environment in which page numbers no longer have any relationship to the pages of text as they are displayed on a web browser. The inclusion of such an internal reference system is the type of utilitarian enhancement of a copyrighted work which is not only permitted but encouraged under fair use provisions of the copyright laws -- laws designed to protect the economic rights of the creators of intellectual property while simultaneously providing for scholarly and educational use of the same materials for the benefit of society.

1b. APersonal Browser Edition@ download version is not current text. Claims copyright in the format for the Fellowship.

This is correct. Our website editions of the text all attempt to faithfully preserve the original text unaltered. To my knowledge this text on The Urantia Book Fellowship website is an accurate reproduction of the original. It is unimaginable to me that Urantia Foundation would define the "inviolate text" as referring to whatever version they were currently publishing.

Note that the text currently displayed on the Foundation's website is formatted completely differently than that of the original text. Their web site text is formatted with a space between each paragraph. The spacing of the original text, including the extra space thought to designate the work of different source authors is completely missing. The Fellowship's electronic text, in addition to reproducing the 1955 text as faithfully as possible, also retains the paragraph spacing formatting of the original. It should also be noted in this regard that the versions of the text of The Urantia Book which Urantia Foundation publishes on audio tape, the one which they publish on their CD, and that which constitutes the current print edition are not identical. There remains great ambiguity as to just what is meant by the term "inviolate text."

1c. ASCII download version does not contain any copyright notice. No Italics in text.

Additional copyright ownership information has been added to Urantia Foundation=s policy statement on the download page at http://urantiabook.org/downloads . This ASCII version is not provided to be printed and read as an ordinary text; it is provided for readers who want to have access to The Urantia Book in electronic book formats. They can download and use this ASCII version to create a text formatted for their particular use. (It would not be difficult to add a copyright notice to this text and then re-compile it into an executable for web downloading.)

Italics cannot be reproduced in straight ASCII text. The loss of italics here is similar to the loss of italics in Urantia Foundation's audio version -- the loss is a function of the change in storage and reproduction media. (For example, Urantia Foundation's audio version is unable to reproduce important formatting elements such as quote marks, exclamation points, parentheses, etc.)

2. Spanish version of UB text not as per Foundation=s Web site license policy (e.g., index includes unauthorized translation listed together with UF=s text. There are 3 versions of the Foreword.)

The comparative study of the Prólogo to El Libro de Urantia has been moved out of the Índice and into a directory with other derivative works and study aids, separate from the text itself. These comparative translations of the Prólogo were provided to meet the requests of readers who wanted to compare the new translation contained within the most recent Urantia Foundation printing of El Libro de Urantia with the original as well as with any other available translations. The ability to compare multiple translations provides an excellent enhancement of study. The website will continue to develop and provide such study aids for the international readership.

3. Unlicensed display of unauthorized translations in Korean, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Croatian, and Russian.

The display of French, Spanish, Russian and Dutch texts is covered by a license granted by Urantia Foundation in 1998. The remaining texts are partial translations created by readers, secondary works designed to serve as study aids for individuals in various language groups. They are presented on the website as works in progress for the purpose of soliciting criticism and suggestions from readers as well as providing multiple points of reference for individuals studying the text by comparing various translations.

4. (Currently Removed) Unlicensed display of Dr. William S. Sadler works

N.A.

5. Fellowship Herald magazine uses UB text but does not acknowledge copyright.

???

6. Urantia Book Illustrated on web site quotes over 20,000 words of UB without attribution or permission.

The Illustrated Urantia Book contains a note of attribution and copyright which has been added to the introductory comments at the top of the page. This is also covered by our general notice regarding the copyright of all quotations from The Urantia Book appearing on the website.

7. McMullan=s 21 Steps to a Spiritual Awakening quotes over 25,000 words of UB without permission. Fellowship website publishes this in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

"21 Steps to a Spiritual Awakening" averages 700 words per chapter quoted from The Urantia Book. Over the 21 chapters of the work this total comes to less than 15,000 words. In addition, some of these quotes, such as the "Conditions of Effective Prayer" in Chapter 10 can be shown to come from works other than The Urantia Book, works of which The Urantia Book makes extensive use with no attributions or permissions whatsoever.

The portions of "21 Steps to a Spiritual Awakening" from The Urantia Book which have been translated into Spanish and Portuguese are original translations, not copies of Urantia Foundation translations.

8. Fellowship is soliciting people to assist it in translating the complete Urantia Book into multiple languages in violation of international law.

The Foundation's attempts to appropriate all translation efforts is driving translation projects underground where they cannot benefit from collaboration or criticism. A good example of this is the recent project by a group of Portuguese readers to collaboratively translate Part IV into Portuguese using one of our public web forums to publish works in progress and to solicit criticism. Urantia Foundation supporters were so abusive that this effort has been moved to a private network where it can proceed without having to tolerate such disruption. Unfortunately, this eliminates participation by a larger public whose comments might be helpful in producing a better quality translation.

The website attempts to provide a forum where translation of the text and related study aids can have greater exposure without requiring an organizational affiliation, the relinquishing of rights by translators, or the forced political alignment required by Urantia Foundation's translator's contract.

9. Hyperlink to Michael Foundation, purveyor of the infringing work, Jesus: A New Revelation.

Michael Foundation is no longer distributing JANR so the description athttp://urantiabook.org/ub_links.htm has been changed to reference the Index to The Urantia Book published by Michael Foundation.

10. Sample of anti-Foundation material.

A disclaimer has been added to the bottom of the Site Index page noting that the materials on the website were drawn from a broad spectrum of the readership and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs or opinions of The Urantia Book Fellowship or the website staff. In general the website will publish any responsibly written essay regardless of political orientation. Urantia Foundation trustees and staff are welcome to submit essays or study aids to be considered for publication. In general, anything having to do with organizational matters in the readership is confined to the history timeline. While space is provided for archiving and accessing such documents, there is no specifically political section of the website and specifically political commentary is not included in the primary areas of the website.

In addition, the publication of varying viewpoints helps prevent the appearance of a cult-like organization which only publishes materials which support an "official" viewpoint. The volume of materials which contain specifically political commentary is kept at between 3% and 5% of the total document collection. This means that, on the Fellowship website, between 95% and 97% of the documents available deal directly with matters related to a study of The Urantia Book.

11. Urantianet being used in some places without the agreed disclaimer (per agreement reached in 1997)

Every page which contains a reference to "Urantianet" also contains a note to the effect that The Urantia Book Fellowship is unaffiliated with Urantia Foundation. It is impossible for anyone to sign up for this service without first encountering such a statement. Should Urantia Foundation find a page containing information about Urantianet services upon which such a disclaimer is not provided, we should be informed so that we may correct the situation.

12. Infringement of trademarks AUrantia,@AUrantian@ (e.g., www.urantiabook.org/index_studygroup_database.htm

The website is designed to provide study aids for The Urantia Book and to stimulate the development of groups of individuals who will study the book and carry its teachings into the various communities in which they participate. As such, the website will refer to these terms as they are derived from and related to such studies. These terms are not used in the identifying manner of a trade mark and it should be clear from the context in which they appear that they do not refer to Urantia Foundation and its commercial goods and services. At present there are well over 100 websites using these terms derived from The Urantia Book. Many of these websites also use variants of the concentric circles as a religious symbol.

The graphic rendering of the word "Urantia" on this page is clearly marked as the name of our planet.

13. Www.urantiabook.org/bookshop/urantiabooks.htlm entitled ABest Prices on the Web for Urantia Books@ says ABuy The Urantia Book!@ and contains price list. Very confusing; it appears they are the source for The Urantia Book.

Yes, individuals may purchase The Urantia Book from sources accessible through our website, sources with whom we have various agreements and whose services we promote. The website is designed to provide supplementary materials for readers and to stimulate new discoverers to purchase books. The texts on the website are not provided to compete with the printed text but rather to stimulate sales. From available information, overall sales of The Urantia Book appear to have increased proportionately with the increase in websites related to The Urantia Book.

14. Registered Internet domain names violate Urantia Foundation trademarks: www.urantiabook.org, www.librourantia.org, www.librourantia.cl, www.urantialink.org, www.urantianet.org, www.urantiaweb.org.

These terms used in our domain names relate to the book and to activities planned and engaged in by readers of the book, and to the legitimate content of the website. The website clearly indicates that it is not affiliated with Urantia Foundation.

15. Fellowship has registered with Real Names as the owner of the name AUrantia,@AUrantia Book@ and ALibro de Urantia.@ This means several of the search engines list this link first as AUrantia RN@ (similar in appearance to TM), causing confusion with Foundation=s trademarks.

The Real Names system is a key word registration service. "Urantia," " Urantia Book," and "Libro de Urantia" are key words related to the content of our website. This link descriptor directs inquirers to the largest archive of The Urantia Book materials on the Internet. At the same time, our early registration of this name assured that it would not be exploited by individuals who may be hostile to the revelation. We have maintained our Real Names registration for more than two years. It is unclear why Urantia Foundation has chosen to delay a complaint about this until the present time.

16. Fellowship is meta-tagging the words AUrantia,@AFoundation,@AInternational Association,@AUrantia Book,@ALibro de Urantia.@

Pages on the Fellowship website which have the words "Urantia," "Foundation," "International Association," "Urantia Book," and "Libro de Urantia,"are documents which are related to these topics. It is the purpose of meta tags to help people locate information for which they may be searching. Our meta tags serve that purpose. If the word "Urantia Foundation" appears in one of our meta tags, it is because the related document either contains information about Urantia Foundation or links to Urantia Foundation's website.

17. Trademark violations of concentric circles symbol.

The example provided by Urantia Foundation is of a document which is a reproduction of an historic early newsletter. This reproduction contains the concentric circles symbol as used prior to its registration as a trade mark by Urantia Foundation. At present there is a significant number of websites displaying the concentric circles symbol in a manner other than that which symbolizes the commercial goods and services of Urantia Foundation.

18. Violation of court=s confidentiality order re: Maaherra documents (e.g., Jacques Weiss page).

The example to which this item refers is an index of historic documents related to the first French translation of The Urantia Book. These documents have been contributed from a variety of readers in addition to those credited. To the best of my knowledge, none of them are under a confidentiality order. If Urantia Foundation can be specific about which document might be thus classified, I can check my sources and will remove from the website any documents contributed by anyone whose private collection is sealed by a confidentiality order, or find copies to display which are not thus protected.

19. Violation of Sadler copyright in Mind at Mischief in English and Spanish

"The Mind at Mischief" was published in 1929. According to the best information I can locate, the maximum term of copyright protection possible for any work published between 1923 and 1963 is 67 years. This is given an initial period of protection for 28 years, renewable for an additional 40 years, extended for an additional 20 years. This would place "The Mind at Mischief" in the public domain.

20. Violation of Urantia Foundation=s confidential business records (translator=s agreement)

The Translator's Agreement which is published on the Fellowship website was provided by an individual whose translation skills were being solicited by Urantia Foundation. This individual was under no confidentiality obligation at the time this copy was made available to the website. The document itself is not marked as being confidential; it appears to become confidential only when signed by a potential translator.

21. Name change -- Urantia Book Fellowship

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Some comments about Urantia Foundation's newly announced website policy:

Urantia Foundation recently announced a new position regarding the publication of the text of The Urantia Book on the web. In this announcement it was indicated that Urantia Foundation's preferred method of web publication would be to have one copy of the text on Urantia Foundation's website to which all other websites would provide links, rather than storing the text itself on these various reader websites.

Having everyone link to one published version creates significant technical issues which will make this very difficult to implement from a technical basis alone. This is particularly true with Urantia Foundation's present web text which exists as one paper per file. In this format, the entire text consists of 196 files which average approximately 50 kilobytes of data each. These are large files and the number of individuals able to simultaneously access these files--even over T1 lines--will be limited. The capacity of a T1 line--the maximum amount of data which it can carry--is 1.44 megabytes. This means that no more than 25 people would be able to access the text of The Urantia Book at one time from a website connected to the Internet via a T1 line.

In my conversations with other webmasters who operate websites which contain the text of The Urantia Book, I am able to estimate that on the Internet as a whole, there are peaks of 50 to 60 individuals simultaneously accessing the text of The Urantia Book. This exceeds the capacity of two T1 lines and would likely also require more than one server in order to avoid saturation of resources.

The website of The Urantia Book Fellowship alone currently has usage peaks of 25 to 30 individuals simultaneously accessing the website. The way in which we have stored the text gives us an average file size of only 7.5 kilobytes per file as compared with Urantia Foundation's average of 50 kilobytes per file. This allows us to accomodate a growing number of users while economizing on server resources. We need to remain free to experiment and develop innovative and creative ways of making the unaltered text available in this technologically complex environment with its rapidly developing means of reproducing the text.

Having one text on the Internet to which everyone is required to link is similar to having one book in a library to which everyone must come in order to read. Urantia Foundation controls the text which appears in books sold by bookstores by controlling the source which is used for printing--the master from which all copies are made. The same could be true for the Internet. If Urantia Foundation provided a master of the inviolate text on their website, webmasters and readers could download it and make it available on their own websites, formatted to fit local contexts and to be reproduced by a variety of technologies. Urantia Foundation would thus be propagating the inviolate text while minimizing the need to maintain complex technological resources.

Ideally, this one text would be the same one which was used for printing The Urantia Book. There would then be one central text, certified by Urantia Foundation, stored in a way which made alteration of the original impossible, from which all copies would be derived. This was originally proposed by Dan Massey over 10 years ago when the possibility of widespread use of digital media first began appearing on the horizon. Today it seems the only way to assure the integrity of the text in a rapidly changing environment of textual reproduction and transmission. Urantia Foundation could go one step further and develop a program which would allow any copy of the text to be compared with their original in order to ascertain conformity. Urantia Foundation could also use this program to test other copies of the text which might appear in various media to be certain that individuals were not changing the text itself, regardless of the media formatting which might be used to reproduce the text in various forms.

Urantia Foundation's new website policy prohibits caching. Yet caching is part of the way in which the Internet works. In fact, its use is growing as a means of increasing the efficiency of bandwidth. For example, if an AOL subscriber in New York accesses the text on Urantia Foundation's website, a copy of the accessed pages will be stored on an AOL computer which serves subscribers in New York. The next time someone from that region accesses the same text, it will be served from the AOL caching server, not Urantia Foundation's server. This is simply how the Internet works and cannot be controlled by a licensing policy.

There are presently well over 100 websites using Urantia related terminology. Many of these provide access to the full text of The Urantia Book. A significant number of them contain artistic renderings of the concentric circles symbol which has significant religious connotations for many readers. This growing use of the Internet to seed the revelation into the lives of individuals around the planet might be compared to the activity described in one of Jesus' parables in Paper 151:

"'A sower went forth to sow, and it came to pass as he sowed that some seed fell by the wayside to be trodden underfoot and devoured by the birds of heaven. Other seed fell upon the rocky places where there was little earth, and immediately it sprang up because there was no depth to the soil, but as soon as the sun shone, it withered because it had no root whereby to secure moisture. Other seed fell among the thorns, and as the thorns grew up, it was choked so that it yielded no grain. Still other seed fell upon good ground and, growing, yielded, some thirtyfold, some sixtyfold, and some a hundredfold.' And when he had finished speaking this parable, he said to the multitude, 'He who has ears to hear, let him hear.'"