European Trademark Case: "OSHO"
Over the last few years a number of people have started legal actions against OSHO International Foundation - the foundation to which Osho entrusted his entire body of work with the instructions to make his work available. These people it seems fundamentally disagree with the way Osho chose to set up the structures to carry on his work.
Since 1985 Osho International Foundation, Switzerland has been the holder of all of Osho's rights and has been responsible for publishing Osho's work and licensing these works to hundreds of publishers around the world. Osho is now published in over 60 languages, and is published by the small and large publishing houses likes of Random House New York, Random House Germany, Mondadori Italy, St. Martin's Press and by a number of Osho publications like OSHO Media International in English and other languages.
In 2010 Ramteertha (Robert Doetsch) from Cologne OSHO Uta Center started yet another legal action, using an original Osho Meditation Center - now called Osho Lotus Commune e.V. - to start a legal case against the European Trademark - registered by OSHO International Foundation to protect Osho's name and work as requested by Osho.
This is actually Ramateertha's second attempt to do so, a first attempt to sabotage Osho's design for his work was 'Osho Friends Europe e.V.' founded in 2002 which closed later as no sannyasins supported the direction of this organization "to bring copyrights and trademarks related to Osho and his works into free domain".
In simple words, Ramateertha does not agree with Osho's view that his work is and should be protected from misuse.
To defend its trademark OSHO International Foundation has filed arguments and material which are available below for review. These documents include a number of documents signed by Osho related to copyright and trademark as well as details how Osho set up his work.
It includes a summary with an overview what the story is about.
Supportive Statements by:
Documents and Exhibits
The Legal Submission and all Witness Statements are supported by documents and Exhibits to which we are linking from each document via hyperlinks. In total this submission has about 2000 pages.
A note about viewing these pages: Chrome has its own PDF viewer which prevents the links between the PDF documents frombeing visible. So, in Chrome you can't access any of the supporting documents and exhibits etc., which are linked from the statements listed above. Other browsers don't have this limitation.
