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[Letterhead from the Legal Department at Patterson] October 19, 2001 |
| Dear Brother Desinger: |
| We note that on your Internet Web site www.desinger.com you have placed source material for the Theocratic Ministry School, as well as material from Examining the Scriptures Daily. You should be aware that the Watch Tower Society’s publications are copyrighted material. Copyright infringement occurs when one copies and distributes copyrighted material without the copyright holder’s permission. This is true even if no profit is involved. |
| While we appreciate that you may have good intentions, as a matter of policy the Watch Tower Society does not grant permission for its publications to be distributed as you are doing. Therefore, we request that you remove this material from the Internet. Please do not view this as a personal disapproval. Rather, this position is a policy that helps protect the Watch Tower Society’s copyrights. |
| Also, we note that you have a link to Watchtower’s official site, www.watchtower.org. So that there is no misperception that Watchtower has some connection with your site, we ask that you please remove this link. |
| We thank you in advance for your cooperation and send an expression of our warm Christian love and greetings. |
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Your brother, (signature of an Associate General Counsel) |
Legally speaking, the Society is the copyright holder. Not objecting to an unauthorized distribution might constitute dilution of copyright. If the copyright is diluted, any apostate could republish the Society’s material, changing it to their own evil ends, and the Society couldn’t take that person to court to stop it. That would be Very Bad Indeed.
I thought that acknowledging the Society’s copyright would be enough to protect their rights. But copyright law as applied to the Internet is vague. The courts are still working out the details, a situation that makes lawyers nervous. So it’s good for us to be understanding when the Society makes a request like this, even when it seems that their request makes life more difficult. Besides, it’s their material after all; they should get to say how it gets distributed.
It was nice to not read any objections to the scripture lists. Copyright law allows for excerpts to be made, and I infer that scripture lists are not copyright infringements. So I hope to keep providing the scriptures, even if the Society objects to my distributing other excerpts of their materials. (The size of an excerpt that doesn’t violate copyright must be one of those details that isn’t fully worked out yet.)
I have to admit that I believe that only an idiot would confuse this web site with the Society’s simply because my pages link to theirs. But, human nature being what it is, maybe somebody has done exactly that. Anyway, it’s easy to comply with the request, and these pages are useful even without the link.
I’ve stopped distributing the School material and Daily Text via links from these pages. Now if you want the files, you’ll need to mail me personally and ask for them. [Note added later: But see below. —bd ]
Although I have no evidence that the Society is even considering it, I hope that they will eventually publish daily and weekly study material from their own web site. Letters from so many brothers and sisters have convinced me that this material helps them to improve their personal study: single parents who work and struggle to build up their children’s spirituality, publishers who make large-print copies for the elderly, pioneers trying to balance service time with personal study time, and elders who care for their congregation and family and selves and who need to save time whenever possible.
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[Letterhead from the Legal Department at Patterson] December 5, 2001 |
| Dear Brother Desinger: |
| Thank you for removing Watch Tower's copyrighted material from your Web site in response to our letter dated October 19, 2001. We note, however, that you now make this material available to individuals who make reqeusts by electronic mail. Please note the following statement in our previous letter: "Copyright infringement occurs when one copies and distributes (italics added) copyrighted material without the copyright holder's permission." Thus, the sending of this material by electronic means is not permissable. Therefore, we ask that you cease this practice. |
| Your cooperation in this matter is appreciated. Please accept an expression of our warm Christian love and greetings. |
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Your brother, (signature of the General Counsel) |
If you would like to see material for the Theocratic Ministry School or daily text on the web (or by any other electronic means), please write to the Society to tell them how it would be beneficial. In a month and a half I’ve mailed out the text 127 times, and the school 391 times. If the Society received 500 short written notes explaining why it would help someone’s spirituality to have this material on the internet, we might just get our wish.