I've been looking round the articles relating to [[A Course In Miracles]] (ACIM). One article details a court case pertaining to authorship, under the rather bizarre premise that since authorship was claimed to be Jesus, "channeled" through Helen Schucman, copyright did not apply. I've asked for some citations from sources outside the ACIM movement for this and other articles in this collection, and received this reply:
"But it is quite a challenge to find comments from people outside of the ACIM "world" when most outside of that insular world have never even heard of ACIM. Most non-ACIM students couldn't be concerned with whether Jesus is the literal or symbolic source, because most non-ACIM students think the whole thing looks insane, cultish, weird, etc."
Now to my mind if there are no sources outside the movement we ought to be very wary about covering the subject at all. This same editor added a section to [[forgiveness]] detailing ACIM's view of the concept which was larger than the section devoted to Bhuddism and about the same size as the one for Islam. My view is that unless we have some reputable secondary sources external to the movement to draw on, we should not include it there at all (else we'll have to have a paragraph for Methylated Wesletarians and Jagism).
Back to the article on the court case: I'd say it's a footnote to the book unless it's been covered extensively in the mainstream media, discussed in the Harvard Law Review as a ground-breaking case, cited as precedent in other cases or whatever. The only cited source we have in that section is from the Foundation for A Course In Miracles, which was one of the parties to the dispute. I am minded to merge.
I don't want to let my natural scepticism run away with me here, how do others view this kind of apparent walled garden?
Guy (JzG)
On 6/30/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
I've been looking round the articles relating to [[A Course In Miracles]] (ACIM). One article details a court case pertaining to authorship, under the rather bizarre premise that since authorship was claimed to be Jesus, "channeled" through Helen Schucman, copyright did not apply. I've asked for some citations from sources outside the ACIM movement for this and other articles in this collection, and received this reply:
"But it is quite a challenge to find comments from people outside of the ACIM "world" when most outside of that insular world have never even heard of ACIM. Most non-ACIM students couldn't be concerned with whether Jesus is the literal or symbolic source, because most non-ACIM students think the whole thing looks insane, cultish, weird, etc."
Now to my mind if there are no sources outside the movement we ought to be very wary about covering the subject at all. This same editor added a section to [[forgiveness]] detailing ACIM's view of the concept which was larger than the section devoted to Bhuddism and about the same size as the one for Islam. My view is that unless we have some reputable secondary sources external to the movement to draw on, we should not include it there at all (else we'll have to have a paragraph for Methylated Wesletarians and Jagism).
Back to the article on the court case: I'd say it's a footnote to the book unless it's been covered extensively in the mainstream media, discussed in the Harvard Law Review as a ground-breaking case, cited as precedent in other cases or whatever. The only cited source we have in that section is from the Foundation for A Course In Miracles, which was one of the parties to the dispute. I am minded to merge.
I don't want to let my natural scepticism run away with me here, how do others view this kind of apparent walled garden?
Quick request for clarification: Are you looking for any articles relating to ACIM or articles specifically relating to the court case? Or both? Thanks. --LV
On Fri, 30 Jun 2006 09:53:27 -0400, "Lord Voldemort" lordbishopvoldemort@gmail.com wrote:
Quick request for clarification: Are you looking for any articles relating to ACIM or articles specifically relating to the court case? Or both?
I want to start at the outside and work back. So: first, see if the case is verifiable and significant, and if not prune and merge back, then see if the Foundation is, and so on. There are rather a lot of articles with a great deal of verbiage on what is, from the perspective of an outsider, a very small movement of no verifiable significance.
Guy (JzG)
On 6/30/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
I want to start at the outside and work back. So: first, see if the case is verifiable and significant, and if not prune and merge back, then see if the Foundation is, and so on. There are rather a lot of articles with a great deal of verbiage on what is, from the perspective of an outsider, a very small movement of no verifiable significance.
Well, the case is real: "Penguin Books U.S.A., Inc. v. New Christian Church of Full Endeavor, Ltd." One of the decisions along the way cited at "262 F. Supp. 2d 251" another at "288 F. Supp. 2d 544". So there is no doubt the case is legit. As to it's importance...
As far as I can tell, it has been used as a note for a few technical things. See:
http://www.abcny.org/Publications/reports/show_html.php?rid=35 (A technical proposal to change some NY court rules regarding attorneys.)
www.law.fsu.edu/faculty/2001-2002workshops/cotter.pdf (pdf... if you couldn't tell. See page 11. Basically just a listing of the case as one relating to adaptation of a religious work as a copyvio... nothing substantive.)
And seemingly one court case about awarding legal fees.
But the case has apparently been used in a few other things relating to the real copyright issue...
www.oiprc.ox.ac.uk/EJWP0903.pdf (pdf on deprivatising copyrights... see page 76 for relevent cite. Basically she uses it to show the court held "For example, in analyzing authorship questions involving religious texts, courts have rejected the argument that since the source of the text is God, there is no human author and therefore the text is not subject to copyright.")
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20040827214309785 ("holding that copyrighted work entered public domain where it was 'published without notice of copyright prior to copyright registration'")
So it looks like it has been used, but to what extent required for notability, I am not sure. The case is verifiable. Does any of this even help... I wrote this email in bits and pieces, so it may be choppy or rambling, my apologies. Let me know if you need more info. Thanks. --LV
On Fri, 30 Jun 2006 11:05:21 -0400, "Lord Voldemort" lordbishopvoldemort@gmail.com wrote:
So it looks like it has been used, but to what extent required for notability, I am not sure. The case is verifiable. Does any of this even help... I wrote this email in bits and pieces, so it may be choppy or rambling, my apologies. Let me know if you need more info.
Well done, thanks. We can take this to Talk, I guess, at the (now updated form your sources) article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorship_of_A_Course_in_Miracles.
Guy (JzG)
On 6/30/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
I want to start at the outside and work back. So: first, see if the case is verifiable and significant, and if not prune and merge back, then see if the Foundation is, and so on. There are rather a lot of articles with a great deal of verbiage on what is, from the perspective of an outsider, a very small movement of no verifiable significance.
Also, for a brief overview... there have been a couple of articles in the Salt Lake Tribune (http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=SLTB&p_theme=sltb...) But I don't have an account. And I don't know if you have to pay for the full article. Just providing some more info. --LV
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
Now to my mind if there are no sources outside the movement we ought to be very wary about covering the subject at all.
Being wary is always a good thing, but I doubt there's consensus for a blanket prohibition on such topics; this is essentially the definition of [[WP:CRUFT]], and we've all seen _that_ debate before.
Some obscure topics, especially religious ones, are very hard for anyone to study in depth without forming an opinion for or against them, or at least being seen as having one. Often this is compounded by an "if you're not with us you're against us" mentality on one or both sides of the debate. Thus, there are few if any generally accepted neutral secondary sources, and the best a tertiary source like Wikipedia can do is balance the arguments from both sides.
Given that the authorship of ACIM seems like a very typical example of such a topic, I'm in fact quite positively surprised by the quality of the article in question.
added a section to [[forgiveness]] detailing ACIM's view of the concept which was larger than the section devoted to Bhuddism and about the same size as the one for Islam.
That certainly seems like a case of undue weight. If the concept is that important to ACIM, the proper place for expanding on it is in the ACIM article (or, indeed, in a subarticle thereof). We can even provide a link to it from the forgiveness article, for those who are interested.
Back to the article on the court case: I'd say it's a footnote to the book unless it's been covered extensively in the mainstream media, discussed in the Harvard Law Review as a ground-breaking case, cited as precedent in other cases or whatever. The only cited source we have in that section is from the Foundation for A Course In Miracles, which was one of the parties to the dispute. I am minded to merge.
I've looked into this a bit, being the one who closed the first AfD. As I wrote in my closing summary, there were several opinions in favor of merging, but also some good arguments for keeping the articles separate. I thus chose to close the debate as "keep", with the understanding that the option to merge was still open if anyone chose to do that.
One argument worth considering is that apparently the authorship section was originally deliberately split from the main ACIM article in order to keep the main article of reasonable length. One might reasonably argue that this gives the authorship debate undue weight, but merging it in its entirety back into main article would give it even _more_ undue weight. This strategy of splitting long sections on obscure subtopics into separate articles is one that has served us well, and as long as the sub-articles are well written and neutral, they do us little harm.
Of course, if one managed to condense the entire sub-article into one or two paragraphs that said everything that needed to be said about the subject, things would be different. I personally tend to take an "I believe it when I see it" approach to such plans, not because I'd be particularly skeptical about them, but simply because their success depends on so many factors that it's hard to predict in advance. But it's definitely not something I'd oppose, if someone can pull it off without throwing away encyclopedic information in the process.
The court case does seem notable to me; it may not be a landmark case, but it's certainly unusual. We probably should have an article on it in some form, if only to link from [[Wikipedia:Unusual articles]].
On 6/30/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
I've been looking round the articles relating to [[A Course In Miracles]] (ACIM). One article details a court case pertaining to authorship, under the rather bizarre premise that since authorship was claimed to be Jesus, "channeled" through Helen Schucman, copyright did not apply.
As a historical footnote, it should be noted that the question of whether "inspired" works are applicable to intellectual property protections goes back to the very origins of the concept of intellectual property. It is part of two different (and competing) definitions of the author as being with a craftsman or being "inspired." During the Renaissance proponents of authorial rights turned the "inspired" notion around so that the author was inspired by their own "original genius" rather than God (or a muse) and thus gave them more of a claim to their own property. It is interesting that it continues to play out in some small way today when the legal definition of intellectual property is much more codified than it was in, say, the eighteenth century.
Anyway, this little tidbit has nothing much to do with your query in particular, I'm afraid...
FF
(The reference for this, for those interested, is available on JSTOR as Martha Woodmansee, "The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the 'Author'," _Eighteenth Century Studies_ 17:4 (Summer 1984): 425-448. I feel something like a parody of an academic at the moment, but perhaps that's just fine.)