A Note on copyrights

In October 1996, the Board of Directors of the College of Thelema, then under the Executive Directorship of Phyllis Seckler (Soror Meral), passed Resolutions confirming the publication policy of the C.O.T..  The resolutions affirmed that the policy of the C.O.T.’s journal, In the Continuum, had always been that the author of material submitted to I.T.C. would retain the rights to their work.  The C.O.T. would retain the right to continue to publish the author’s material in I.T.C. in perpetuity.  The Board further affirmed that this policy applied to the material written by Phyllis Seckler, just as any other contributor.  Phyllis Seckler, therefore, retained the copyrights to her own material throughout her life, and at the time of her death in 2004. 

Phyllis Seckler’s Last Will stipulated that any property not specifically bequeathed would pass to the Phyllis Seckler Living Trust, in the person of its Executor.  Since Ms. Seckler’s copyrights were not specifically bequeathed to any individual or corporate entity, they passed  to the Trust.   In August 2008, the Trustee formally transferred the copyrights to the writings of Phyllis Seckler to the College of Thelema of Northern California (a separate corporation from the Southern California-based College of Thelema).  The Trust acknowledged the C.O.T.N.C. as the sole legal custodian of Phyllis Seckler’s literary estate, diaries, library, and archives. 

The C.O.T.N.C.’s rights extend to the material written by Ms. Seckler and originally published in In the Continuum and its successor journal, Black Pearl, (which operated under the same publication policy as I.T.C.), pursuant to the C.O.T. publication policy discussed above.

The C.O.T.N.C. supports the right of the Southern California-based College of Thelema (now under the Chancellorship of James Eshelman) to publish Ms. Seckler’s work in its original form within In the Continuum and Black Pearl, in perpetuity.