The Foundation for Inner Peace, formed by Judith Skutch, later Skutch Whitson, published the Course's first hardcover edition in 1976. Kenneth Wapnick, a psychologist who had joined Schucman and Thetford in editing the manuscript, went on in 1983 to found a second organization, the Foundation for A Course in Miracles, to teach the material along more traditionally Christian lines than some other students preferred. The book gained a much wider audience after Marianne Williamson discussed it on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1992, and related titles built on it, including Gerald Jampolsky's Love Is Letting Go of Fear, sold in the millions.
The Foundation for Inner Peace and the Foundation for A Course in Miracles sued the New Christian Church of Full Endeavor and its Endeavor Academy in the late 1990s for reproducing large sections of the Course without permission. The defendants argued that Jesus, not Schucman, was the Course's true author, and that a deity's words cannot be copyrighted. The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York did not rule on that theological question. It found instead, in a decision issued October 24, 2003 (Penguin Books USA v. New Christian Church of Full Endeavor, 288 F. Supp. 2d 544), that the Foundation had lost its copyright in the original 1976 through 1992 printings by failing to include a proper copyright notice under the law then in force, placing that first edition text in the public domain, while copyright in the revised Second Edition and Schucman's separate poetry remained valid.