After researching about 1,000 copyright cases in American legal history, Ramik issued a 27-page legal opinion in which he concluded "Ellen White was not a plagiarist, and her works did not constitute copyright infringement/piracy."
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After researching about 1,000 copyright cases in American legal history, Ramik issued a 27-page legal opinion in which he concluded "Ellen White was not a plagiarist, and her works did not constitute copyright infringement/piracy."
A Roman Catholic lawyer, Vincent L. Ramik, undertook a study of Ellen G. White's writings during the early 1980s, and concluded that they were "conclusively unplagiaristic." When the plagiarism charge ignited a significant debate during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Adventist General Conference commissioned a major study by Dr. Fred ...
Attorney Vincent Ramik’s Lawyer’s Brief: In the autumn of 1981, Attorney Warren L. Johns, then chief legal counsel in the General Conference’s Office of Legal Counsel, using private funds, engaged the services of Attorney Vincent Ramik, senior partner of the Diller, Ramik, and Wight, specialists in patent , trademark, and copyright law. Attorney Ramik was provided for his …
2. Ellen G. White is not guilty of copy- right infringement or plagiarism. This is the opinion of Vincent L. Ramik, senior partner of Diller, Ramik & Wight, Ltd., a lawyer who practices patent, trademark, and copyright law in Washington, D.C. Mr. Ramik undertook to research Mrs. White’s writings after Warren L. Johns, chief legal officer of the General Confer- ence, retained the …
1. The first newspaper criticism of Ellen White was reported by The Church of God (Seventh Day) after splitting from the Seventh-day Adventist church. This account accused White of suppressing some of her earlier writings. The controversy made it into the newspapers in 1866 in Battle Creek and San Francisco.
Rea’s persistent estimates of the rising amounts of borrowing in Ellen White’s most appreciated works eventually attracted the attention of General Conference president Neal Wilson (Wilson and Rea were classmates at PUC). After taking up Rea’s request to review his findings, Wilson, in conjunction with the General Conference President’s Executive Advisory or PREXAD, agreed to appoint a group of administrators and scholars to study Rea’s evidence. Arthur White vigorously opposed this undertaking!
Prior to the L.A. Times' story, in January 1980, Wilson had appointed an ad hoc committee to study Rea’s findings and reported in the Adventist Review that “the degree of borrowed material and literary dependence is of alarming proportions.” The committee recognized that if church members found this out without proper preparation it could prove to be disastrous. Wilson cautioned the Rea-study committee against using such terms as “literary dependency and extensive borrowing and paraphrasing.” In the L.A. Times interview Wilson used a little-known defense about how this borrowing might have happened. He explained to Dart that “the Holy Spirit helps the messenger to select his material carefully….The prophet’s use of existing materials does not necessarily mean that the prophet is dependent on these sources.” Dart quoted Wilson as saying that “originality is not a test of inspiration.” He added, “The Holy Spirit helps the messenger to select his materials carefully….The prophet’s use of existing materials does not necessarily mean that the prophet is dependent on these sources.”
On Thursday, October 23, 1980, the captivating headline across the front page of the Los Angeles Times read “Seventh-day Adventist Controversy Plagiarism Found in Prophet Books.”1 The Adventist Church was jolted in the public media by wrenching skepticism and doubt about the verity of its prophetess. Only this time, the defense of Ellen White’s legacy, glued to the pedestal of church authority, would have to rely on refutations and defenses provided by “Stewards of the Lord” (to use Mrs. White’s phrase). Syndicated in the Associated Press, the article traveled worldwide and swept into other media—some estimated that the “plagiarism story” was published in hundreds of newspapers and magazines.2
Rea was energetic, witty, personable, gracious, and spry at eighty-eight years. His appearance was your average, bald-headed, spectacles-wearing, genteel grandfather wearing jeans, tennis shoes, and a long-sleeved shirt. During the day he offered me Mountain Dew—his favorite drink. He drove me back and forth to my RV in a bright yellow Ford pickup. Rea lived on ten acres of orchards near the edge of Patterson, California.
A year later President Wilson was interviewed in Christianity Today. The literary borrowing problem was narrowed to “Satan’s subtle sophistry and cunningness.”9 Over the course of the next few years, great lengths would be taken by the church to refute the so-called evidence of plagiarism or to simply brush aside the facts and provide new meanings regarding White’s inspiration.10
Historian Ronald L. Numbers (University of Wisconsin) explained to Dart that White’s psychological profile failed to support her claims of divine inspiration: “When you look at her visions, hallucinations, depression and loss of speech, if she weren’t a religious leader, you would have had her in therapy.”
In 1981 the church hired copyright attorney Vincent L. Ramik of the law firm Diller, Ramik and Wight to examine Ellen White's writings and present them with his conclusions. Two factors should be considered here, which make the story even more fascinating:
Regarding the specific portions of other writers that she had used, Ramik said that she had "modified, exalted, and improved" the writings of others in an ethical, as well as legal, manner. (Ibid.)
Ramik's examination and conclusions are usually mentioned only in passing (if mentioned at all) by the critics when their allegations are presented. His research is treated in such a non-chalant way that it would be easy to underestimate the significance of his findings. One brother who took issue with Ramik points to the fact that in one of the cases studied a defendant was found guilty. Ramik had, however, studied 1000 cases in his research, and many are referred to in his full report above. What is important is Ramik's conclusions after studying all of the case histories and comparing them to Ellen White's writings, not the outcome of one of the cases studied. When that many trials are examined, inevitably the results will show both guilty and not guilty verdicts. We hope that by making the reports and interviews available many seekers of truth will be blessed and many questions will be answered.
In this series of pages we examine the comparisons between the two books provided for us by critic Sydney Cleveland. Dirk Anderson Nixes Plagiarism Charge Dirk Anderson is one of Ellen White's most avid critics, and often accuses her of plagiarism.
Borrowing from Conybeare and Howson (?) Back in 1919, Dudley Canright charged that Ellen White had plagiarized her 1883 book, Sketches from the Life of Paul, from a book by two British authors.
Ramik, and one by the Adventist General Conference, both in the 1980s. Both concluded that Ellen White’s writings did not exhibit plagiarism. Ramik’s report states:
Not only did Ellen White not plagiarize by any legal standard , her copying from certain authors also does not create a conflict with the concept of inspiration. God is the ultimate source of her writings.