Foundation-Fellowship Relations, July 20, 2000
and
July 7 Fellowship Response to the Trustees
At its July 3 meeting, the General Council directed the Executive Committee to appoint a special team to manage all aspects of relations with Urantia Foundation (UF), with authority to employ any and all resources of The Urantia Book Fellowship (The Fellowship) in this work. This action is intended to free other components of The Fellowship to pursue their mission without concern for this troublesome area This summary explains the events and conditions leading to this decision.
For the past two years, The Urantia Book Fellowship has operated a site on the World Wide Web (http://urantia-book.org) that provides the community with access to the English text of the Book, UF translations, experimental translations of small parts of the text, secondary works, movement history, reader services, source materials, and technically advanced search and reference tools and hyperlinks. We present complete texts of the Book in various languages under a license granted by UF.
About a year ago, we began to receive a series of communications from George Dupont, a UF Trustee, and some of his associates, complaining about various aspects of The Fellowship's web site. The first complaint, from Mr. Dupont's father, claimed a "moral right" in the UF French translation and demanded its immediate removal. Since the French concept of "moral right" does not exist in U.S. Copyright Law, and since we presented the translation under UF license, we referred the matter back to UF. Subsequent communications from other UF personnel challenged our presentation of news articles about believer activities involving the word "Urantia", our display of believer artworks containing the word "Urantia", concentric circle motifs, and/or quotations from the Book, and our publication of selections from interpretive works about the Book by Dr. William S. Sadler, for which UF claimed copyright.
In each case, as these complaints were received, we responded to the best of our ability to adjust the material on our web site in response to UF concerns. Dr. Sadler's out-of-print secondary works were deleted, rendering them no longer available in any form to the community. Experimental translations were relocated to pages requiring user identification and login, reducing their availability to international believers who cannot read the languages of UF translations.
Throughout this period, we felt that the tone of UF demands, none of which bore the signatures of the five Trustees, indicated that some UF staff misunderstood our motivation in developing and operating the web site and did not appreciate our commitment to work through these concerns in a cooperative way. Accordingly, we early on asked to meet with the five Trustees to explore and to clarify the relationship between our two organizations. Unfortunately, the Trustees did not see fit to permit such a meeting. At one time, we were offered a meeting in Chicago on one week's notice, to coincide with a major UF fund raising event. The only other meeting we were offered was to be in Paris, France, again on one week's notice. When we accepted the Paris offer, it was promptly withdrawn.
Mr. Dupont now began to demand that The Fellowship send representatives to meet exclusively with himself and a group of non-Trustees of his choosing. We advised the Trustees that we would meet with Mr. Dupont team to hear their complaints if they assented to subsequently meet with us to address broader issues. With this understanding, on April 8 & 9, four of us (Steve Dreier, Marilynn Kulieke, Marvin Gawryn, and Dan Massey) met in Chicago with Mr. Dupont, Tonia Baney, Seppo Kanerva, and Nancy Shaeffer. We were somewhat dismayed to find that Mr. Dupont had also brought Mr. Steve Hill, UF counsel, to the meeting.
At this meeting, the UF team presented us with a book of about 700 pages of material copied from The Fellowship's web site, organized into some 21 specific complaints. The overall theme of the complaints was that The Fellowship was trying to usurp the functions and goodwill of UF by systematic violation of UF copyrights and trademarks, including a newly claimed trademark in the name "The Urantia Book". UF maintains their specific complaints are confidential, so we cannot discuss them publicly in detail. Generally, however, we thought some of the complaints were entirely reasonable, others were extremely small-minded, and still others raised significant policy issues for The Fellowship that should be discussed with the General Council and, if possible, the UF Trustees.
After the meeting, we quickly acted to correct our obvious mistakes and simply deferred to UF requests in a number of other areas. We reported these actions by letter to the Trustees and Mr. Dupont's team on May 8, highlighting the need for General Council discussion and a meeting with UF Trustees to address the significant policy issues. On June 9 we received a letter from Ms. Schaeffer on behalf of Mr. Dupont's team in which some of our actions were acknowledged and others overlooked. This letter offered a summary of four areas in which UF demanded specific changes to The Fellowship's operations.
These areas relate to the manner in which The Fellowship web site displays the English text; the fact that The Fellowship displays UF translations and other partial translations of the Book; use of Internet RealNames, URLs, and metatags including the word "Urantia" in connection with the web site; and the fact that The Fellowship has conducted its work for several years under the name "The Urantia Book Fellowship". On this last point, we subsequently learned that, two weeks before our meeting with Mr. Dupont, UF applied for a Federal trademark registration of the words "The Urantia Book" to identify their clothing, toys and sporting goods, housewares and glass, and paper products.
After a detailed review of these and other matters on July 3-4, the General Council concluded that the relationship of The Fellowship to UF should, in the future, be managed by a dedicated team that could give full attention to these matters and free the council and committees for other work. This decision was in keeping with a resolution of the TDA, as well as a request of Ms. Schaeffer in her June 9 letter that a point-of-contact be established for formal discussions. During the council meeting, the team received guidance concerning the relative importance of the different issues that UF wishes to resolve; however, final disposition of these and other matters is left to the judgment of the team, with the advice of legal counsel. On July 9, the Fellowship team advised the Trustees and Mr. Dupont's team of its formation and its intent to proceed promptly to consult with counsel and to work diligently towards a fair resolution of all issues. It is the belief of the Fellowship team that this would be easiest to accomplish through direct contact with the full UF board; however, the Fellowship team will work with all UF representatives, as appropriate.
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Friday, July 7, 2000
Richard Keeler, President, Urantia Foundation
Trustees of Urantia FoundationDear Richard and Trustees;
This letter responds Urantia Foundation's June 9, 2000 communication to Fellowship representatives over the signature of Urantia Foundation's Copyright/Trademark Team. That letter raised a number of copyright, trademark, and license matters of concern to the Foundation. Aspects of these matters involving Fellowship policy were reviewed by The Fellowship's General Council at its meeting of July 2-3, 2000.
The Fellowship's General Council sincerely desires to maintain friendly and cooperative relations with Urantia Foundation. Accordingly, in response to he Foundation's June 9 letter, the Council mandated the formation of a committee empowered to address and, where possible, to resolve matters raised in the Foundation's June 9 letter in a mutually satisfactory manner.
Since the Foundation's June 9 letter raises complex issues of a legal nature, the Council further directed that legal counsel be retained to advise the Fellowship on those matters. This is expected to be accomplished very shortly, after which the Fellowship's representatives will provide the Foundation with specific responses concerning the various matters discussed in the June 9 letter.
As noted in your June 9 letter, the Fellowship has already made various adjustments to its website in response to complaints raised by Urantia Foundation. We have made changes not noted in your letter and are continuing technical efforts to accommodate your concerns. These actions should be taken as a sign of the Fellowship's good faith intentions towards Urantia Foundation in seeking to acceptably resolve the concerns which exist between the two organizations. After the Fellowship has consulted legal counsel, it is expected that further substantial and lasting progress will be made in these matters.
The Fellowship has repeatedly requested a meeting with the five Trustees of Urantia Foundation concerning these and other matters. Our understanding has always been that the Trustees would arrange such a meeting consequent upon the Fellowship's sending certain individuals to meet with the Foundation's Copyright/Trademark Team in Chicago on April 8-9, 2000. The June 9 letter from that team states: "Your report again mentions a meeting with the Trustees. As we have explained on a number of occasions, this group cannot respond to that request. Please contact Richard Keeler about a meeting with the Trustees."
Accordingly, this letter is addressed to Richard Keeler, President of Urantia Foundation, and to the other Trustees, with copies to the Foundation's Copyright/Trademark Team. Once again, we respectfully request a meeting with the Trustees of Urantia Foundation in the conviction that such a meeting will provide the best circumstances for the resolution of outstanding differences between the Fellowship and Foundation, and set the stage for lasting peaceful and cooperative relations between the two organizations.
Sincerely,
The Fellowship's Foundation Relations Committee
Avi Dogim
S teve Dreier
Marvin Gawryn
Marilynn Kulieke
Dan MasseyCc: Urantia Foundation Copyright/Trademark Team
Tonia Baney
Steve Hill
Seppo Kanerva
Georges Michelson-Dupont
Nancy Shaffer