Please Help Us Defend Ourselves against Transcendental Meditation Bullying

You may know the "Maharishi Foundation, Ltd." legally threatened us for alleged copyright violations because I publicly posted Transcendental Meditation Movement insider emails. Emails that they had requested be forwarded to all interested parties! (You can read the redacted versions below. Just look for recent posts with FBI-style blackened text.)

How do you spell Transcendental Meditation? S-c-i-e-n-t-o-l-o-g-y!

But we are not without defenses! You, our readers, are our secret weapon.

Please consider posting about this attack on your Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter streams. Or emailing to any friend that may have a sincere interest.

Together we can stop their outrageous attempts to silence critics by shedding light on TM's dark secrets through public knowledge.

Here's the tweet I'm hoping will be retweeted to make their outrageous attack on free speech viral.

Transcendental Meditation trying to silence critics. Pls help! RT to make outrageous legal threats viral. http://bit.ly/FEfN2

Would you consider posting such a message to your social networking accounts or email?

If you do post a message, please let us know in the comments to this post. Just click on "Comments" below and share your feelings and actions around this issue.

Thanks for all your support!

Transcendental Meditation Rattles Our Chains -- Yet Again

Another day. Another adversarial letter from a lawyer representing a TM organization asking us to shut something down.

Ho-hum.

I redacted two posts, here and here, to attempt to meet the demands of Jim Nemmers, Esq., of Shuttleworth & Ingersoll, P.L.C., who claims to represent the Maharishi Foundation Ltd., England. He states that MFL owns the copyright to the email and the service marks and trademarks in two emails I posted.

(Interestingly, a little sweat applied to a Google search box reveals that MFL appears to be a nonprofit corporation dormant for 10 years — without assets, without any mention of intellectual property assets.)

I believe my original posts met the requirements for a Fair Use exception to copyright laws, being news, information, criticism, educational, and parodic, as well as being for a non-commercial purpose. In fact, I thought the full posts served the TM Org well by providing the entire context of their email so readers could make their own informed opinions about the material presented.

I've got to wonder why Jim and his client MFL are scared of us publishing their own, exact words in full context. Especially when these emails are typically accompanied by requests to share them with any interested parties.

This is a temporary response to Jim's demands, as I research with our advisers how copyright and intellectual property rights apply to this situation.