In 1999, the Foundation for Inner Peace filed a copyright complaint against the New Christian Church of Full Endeavor whose Endeavor Academy was printing an adapted version of the Course as part of their core curriculum. Endeavor’s defense during the ensuing trial asserted that the Foundation’s copyright was invalid and the text had entered the public domain. They argued that the work was ineligible for copyright protection due to its divine authorship, as Schucman had been specifically instructed by Jesus to keep her name as author off public records. They also claimed the plaintiffs’ assertion of copyright constituted an infringement on their freedom of religion and that the publication and use of the text was permissible as fair use. All of the aforementioned defenses along with eight other arguments were dismissed save one: prior publication. Endeavor Academy successfully determined that un-copyrighted manuscripts—the ones circulated by Skutch Whitson in San Francisco in 1975—had been generally distributed before publication, thus nullifying the later filing for copyright. Had the Foundation for Inner Peace demonstrated that they distributed the book to a limited and select group of people, then distribution would not have qualified as prior publication and the copyright would still have been legitimate. Instead, in the summary decision on the case the presiding judge wrote, “The Court is unable to see in this picture any definitely selected individuals or any limited, ascertained group or class to whom the communication was restricted…An interest in spiritual experience fails to define a class adequately.”
The question the court raised was a serious one and one that carries repercussions for the ways in which we conceive of organizations that arise around the self-conscious practice of spirituality. At what point does a distributed network of interested individuals cohere into an apprehensible group of like-minded followers, a united community of believers? For the many Americans who claim to be spiritual but not religious, how do they imagine their spiritual allegiances, their relationship to religious experience, their consumption of sacred texts? Are their actions simply tactics deployed in the service of individual self-improvement, self-exploration and therapy, or are they understood as being part of a shared set of practices among a community of like-minded seekers? The issue with A Course in Miracles was that the early version of the text was not distributed to a predetermined group precisely because its circulation in the early stages of its existence was serving to constitute the group itself. The movement of the text between hands constituted the very mechanism by which a network of individuals could be linked together, who could then become visible to themselves as a unified community of followers.
Ironically, both the assertion of property rights used to prohibit infringement and the free distribution of copies of an earlier manuscript were practiced by the Foundation for Inner Peace at different times in its publication history. What the courts saw as mutually exclusive and self-negating modes of distribution, the Foundation may have seen as mutually enforcing and supplementary methods of dissemination. The Foundation claimed that they copyrighted the work only so that it might be distributed more broadly and they could more effectively satisfy growing demand in the text. But the later recourse to intellectual property law by the Foundation in order to assert control over a revelation came across as disingenuous to many, including the court. The presiding judge wrote, “The decision to copyright and thereby to control and profit by the distribution of the Course was made after the distribution of the xerox copies described above…The mystical experience reported by Wapnick and Skutch Whitson [co-founders of the Foundation and stewards of A Course in Miracles appointed by Schucman and Thetford] was converted by Skutch Whitson into a property right.”
In response to their subsequent loss of copyright, many at the Foundation felt the need to explain their failed legal maneuvers. Joseph Jesseph, member of the Foundation for A Course in Miracles, wrote in his publishing history of the text, “There are some who still feel that true spiritual works such as A Course in Miracles hardly need the mundane protection of copyright,” a right that he described as being associated with and affirming precisely the same ‘ego framework’ that the text was working so hard to undo as the cause of many personal problems. But he provided the following apologia:
Page 2 of 3 | Previous page | Next page