Copyright and the 'control disease'

By Swami B.G. Narasingha

Some years ago, the BBTI sent a representative, one swami from Sweden, to my āśrama in South India. He said that the BBTI wanted to print “In Search of the Ultimate Goal of Life”, the book of Śrīla Prabhupāda that we printed back in the 90’s. Anyhow, they wanted to reprint it and distribute it worldwide in many languages. I thought it was a great idea! They could print it in Russian, Czech, Chinese, French and distribute it all over the world! Wonderful! I told them that I was ready to give them permission, because we copyrighted the book. I didn’t even want any money for it.

But that Swami said, "No no. We want to own it."

I asked him, “Why? If I’m giving you full permission to translate it and distribute it everywhere, why you need to own it?”

“No, no. We need to own the copyright!”

Finally I told him, “You see, that's your disease! Some years before, one of your gurus even wanted to copyright the mahā-mantra. That means you can’t print the mahā-mantra anyhwhere, you can’t chant it without permission, all these things. I mean, it’s ridiculous!”

So anyhow, that swami left disappointed. Then some years later, two members of the BBTI wrote to me and asked again, and again I gave the same answer. And again they both said the same thing - “No, we must own ALL of Prabhupada’s books!” I told them, “No deal!” I wrote and told them:

“This has led us to believe that BBTI was only interested in controlling our little project and not recognizing the chance for greater cooperation and appreciation among Godbrothers. We are definitely not interested in being controlled by anyone or any institution that does not have our best interests at heart or does not facilitate our continued service to Srila Prabhupada.”

Then they wrote back saying something like, “Okay. Hope you are well” and that was that.

So that’s their disease - “We need to own it all! Nobody can print Prabhupāda’s books without our permission! We are the sole heirs to Prabhupāda. We are carrying on his teachings and legacy.” Like there’s nobody else out there who’s a Prabhupāda disciple worth anything. Doesn’t matter if you all share the same guru, the same spiritual father. The rest of us are like some bastard children that he really didn’t like. That’s how they see things.

I know that ___ Mahārāja and others are also of the same opinion as the BBTI and want to control the copyright of Śrīla Śrīdhara Maharaja’s books - something that he was totally against. In his own words, “My words are the property of the Vaiṣṇavas.” His only concern was that it should not “become a trade”. In other words, the books should not be printed simply to make money. When we published Follow The Angels in 2001, we got flak from the maṭha. “Oh, you can’t publish Guru Mahārāja’s books without our permission! You are making money from Guru Mahārāja!” That was one of their complaints. Truth be told, we never make any money off these books. In fact, we lose money because we give away so many copies for free to different individuals. I’m really not concerned about that. Even if we lose money, let the books go out. We want the message to reach everyone.

Actually, this copyrighting of the words of our ācāryas is all nonsense. We only copyrighted Prabhupāda’s book because I knew that Iskcon would cause trouble otherwise. But that book was wrtten in ’59, so it fell out of their jurisdiction legally. Can you actually copyright Bhagavad-gītā - means the direct words of Kṛṣṇa? No. So Prabhupāda says that “I am not writing these books, Kṛṣṇa is writing them.” If you really believe in that statement, then what the ācāryas write - that’s non-different from Kṛṣṇa! So how can it be copyrighted? Is the original Bible copyrighted?

So it all boils down to the same thing in the end - control, control, control! “We own Prabhupāda!” or “We own Guru Mahārāja!” Both parties are saying exactly the same thing. That’s one of the reasons why I decided to publish my own Gītā.

One reason was that in India, Iskcon refused to sell me any of Prabhupāda’s books - they hoped that without selling Prabhupāda’s books, I would just dry up and blow away, so they wouldn’t give any books. Actually, it was the Ṛtviks who eventually sold us Prabhupāda’s books - at cost price also! But the other side, means Iskcon, refused to give. Typical small-minded institutional consciousness…