Fellowship response of January 10, 2000
January 10, 2000
Richard Keeler, President
Urantia Foundation
533 Diversey Parkway
Chicago, IL, 60614
Dear Richard,
Thank you for your letter of December 15th concerning our desire to meet with you to discuss matters of mutual concern and benefit to the revelation. Since we are all similarly pledged to disseminate the Urantia Revelation, it benefits both our organizations and the reader community for us to discuss misunderstandings and differences of opinion. In fact, in our November 1997 meeting between the five Urantia Foundation Trustees and the five Fellowship Executive Committee members, the terms of our agreement specified face-to-face meetings in advance of any potential legal actions. We appreciate your expressed commitment to the terms of this historic agreement.
Your statement, “Ceasing the unauthorized display on, and the removal from, the Fellowship’s Web site of the French and Spanish translation of The Urantia Book would create the basis for a truly productive meeting,” puzzles us. On September 8th, 1998, Urantia Foundation publicly announced “New Copyright, Internet, and Trademark Usage Policies. We informed you of our acceptance of the Internet Policy, “License to Reproduce The Urantia Book on an Internet Web Site,” by letter of February 9th, 1999. By the present letter, we affirm our acceptance of this license. Since we have complied with the terms of this license, we do not understand why you feel our display of these texts is “unauthorized.”
We have reviewed your overall concerns as explained in your October 12th letter, and have removed from our web site the works of Dr. William S. Sadler, of which you claim ownership, as a show of our good intentions. We did not intend to infringe the copyright for these works and hope we can work together to reach an agreement to make these materials available.
As we have consistently expressed, we believe we can resolve the issues you have raised in a face-to-face meeting between the five Trustees and five members of the Fellowship Executive Committee. We understand that Georges Dupont will be in the states during the second week in February. Perhaps we could meet on the 7th and 8th of February in the Dallas area, since the five members of our team will be in Dallas from the 4th to the 6th for a GC meeting. If this is acceptable, please let me know soon and I will complete the arrangements.
Sincerely,
Janet Farrington Graham
President
The Urantia Book Fellowship