Donna, David, and the Innersource Staff
February 28, 2018
A Legal Action. One of the most distasteful chapters in the life of EEM has just come to a close. It involved a legal case around copyright infringement that has occupied us over the past 3 years. While we were prohibited from sharing anything about the case with you while it was unfolding, we have just prepared this report, in part because our close community has a right to know about such a development and in part to create a semi-public statement of the principles we were defending.
Winning. The great news is that we won the case! The court issued an injunction prohibiting further mis-use of our work and copyright to the infringing works was transferred to us.
But Also Losing. Unless you or someone close to you has gone through it, you probably have only a vague idea of what a lawsuit like this entails in terms of time, focused attention, and distress. And expense! Beyond the massive financial drain, it was a blow to our spirits that we would even be brought into such a dispute. And it was completely disheartening to our staff to be managing the lawsuit. They had hired on to help bring beautiful services to the world, and they were finding themselves burdened with lawsuit-driven activities that distracted them from day-to-day responsibilities. It also broke their hearts (and ours) to be writing large checks to our attorney’s office every month while knowing we didn’t have the funds for many of the worthy projects we would like to be carrying out, some of which are desperately needed. Many research and programmatic opportunities were not followed, deserving raises were not given, and vital company systems were not upgraded. There were times we feared that the lawsuit might force us into bankruptcy.
The Context. When we began our journey of offering self-care methods to the public and healing tools to professionals so many years ago, we were somewhat naïve, believing that by changing lives, by helping people access their deep energetic resources for healing and vitality, all would be well. Largely it has been. We have touched millions of lives. We have created a widely-admired Certification Program that has graduated some 1,400 practitioners who are helping to restore health, relieve suffering, and who are making a genuine difference in the world. Our books are in more than 20 languages, and reports of our impact in countries we’ve never visited continue to amaze us. Meanwhile, we get to experience the joy of so many who embrace our work, and we hear of heart-warming healings every week. It has all been most gratifying.
But our successes have been accompanied by growing pains and a variety of grueling unexpected challenges. One of those challenges has been this lawsuit, which has been confronting us every day over these past three years. In offering tools and techniques to practitioners, and thus the public, we attempt to insure as much as humanly possible each client’s positive experiences with the methods. We continually confront this challenge in our writings, classes, DVDs, and online courses. We also impose stringent requirements to make certain that our practitioners – from graduates of the basic two-year EEM Certification Program to our most advanced providers – are competent, thus ensuring that when clients put their faith, time, and resources into EEM, they are likely to receive strong benefit. When we learned that some of our advanced materials were being sold to the public as self-care tools with no such measures being taken, we were very concerned.
Forced to Take Legal Action. After being unable to reach a resolution with the party marketing the materials, we consulted an attorney to guide us through the maze of complicated issues associated with copyright violations. The first thing we learned was that if we didn’t formally respond to an infringement of our copyrighted material, we could lose copyright protection, opening the door for other misuses of our work, including misleading documents that promise what only a trained practitioner can deliver. In addition to disallowing other types of unauthorized use, the law reserves for an author exclusive rights to create “derivative works” based upon a previous book or other production. This is important because what is omitted in health care instructions may be as important as what is included, and the way the material is framed is also critical for its proper use.
We are deeply committed to making self-healing tools widely available, and we are in fact known for being quite generous in freely giving permissions for our materials to be used in a wide range of educational and healing contexts. But in this instance, we saw no responsible option other than to initiate a lawsuit to protect the integrity of our work, the well-being of those accessing it, and to salute the actions of those of you who are using it responsibly.
That decision led us down into the rabbit hole of a legal system that seems as intent on feeding itself as on upholding justice. We spent inordinate amounts of time working with our attorney on necessary motions before the court and other procedures as we watched our legal fees soar.
Happy Ending. Despite the long ordeal, personal travail, and forever lost revenues that could have done a lot of good, justice did ultimately prevail, and we are delighted that this chapter is behind us. Thank you, dear community, for your enduring support.