Re: Copyright and heresy

On Fri, 27 Jan 1995, Paschos Mandravelis wrote:
>
> History seems to repeat itself, even in the case of copyright.
> According to an open letter of EFF (forwarded below), the Church of
> Scientology is threatening several printers of our times (system
> administrators) with lawsuits for copyright infringement, in an
> apparent attempt to stop discussion in newsgroups about the church.

And in an open letter from the Electronic Frontier Foundation it is written:

> These threats apparently are designed to convince sysadmins
> to discontinue the carriage of certain newsgroups that involve
> discussions of the Church of Scientology and its teachings, solely
> on the ground that some of the messages sent through these
> newsgroups allegedly involve infringements of CoS copyrights or
> other intellectual property rights.
>
> EFF has also received a letter from CoS stating that it would
> not use the threat of lawsuits against sysadmins if there were
> any other way to deal with allegedly wrongful messages.
>
> EFF believes there is a better way to deal with allegations of
> wrongful messages -- and that using the threat of litigation to
> shut down entire newsgroups, or to persuade sysadmins who
> have not originated any allegedly wrongful messages to shut down
> newsgroups, is itself highly inappropriate.
>
> .....
>
> Rather than attempting through threats of lawsuits to induce
> innocent sysadmins to censor speech, Church members are
> encouraged to participate in Usenet discussions to make their views
> known and refute erroneous posts -- in other words, to answer
> allegedly wrongful postings with more speech. As U.S. Supreme Court
> Justice Louis Brandeis articulated in 1927: "If there be time to
> expose through discussion the falsehood and the fallacies, to avert
> the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is
> more speech, not enforced silence."

etc etc

I don't know whether this has been addressed by other cni-c list members yet (I'm catching up on a monster back-log of email) but many of you may be interested to know that this business of using copyright law to suppress discussion (ie, criticism) of its religion is nothing new for the Church of Scientology (CoS). In fact, one of the better known English cases on fair dealing arose from litigation brought by the CoS.

Hubbard v Vosper [1972] 2 QB 84 (Court of Appeal) rejected the CoS claims that reproduction of "substantial" parts of its works in the context of a book critical of the "cult of Scientology" was infringement of copyright. The reason for this was that the defence of fair dealing for the purpose of criticism or review applied. This also happens to be the case in which Lord Denning MR uttered the famous words "It is impossible to define what is `fair dealing' " (who can argue with that kind of comment!).

In any event, if the EFF and others at whom the CoS has directed their warnings have not read this case, I strongly urge them to do so. The Court gives the idea that copyright can be used to suppress criticism a big whack on the head.

    | Jamie Wodetzki, Copyright Research Officer   \ / Australian Council of Libraries and Information Services A C L I S PO Box E202 Queen Victoria Terrace Canberra ACT 2600   / \ Tel +61 6 262 1273 Fax +61 6 273 4493    / \ Email j.wodetzki[_at_]nla.gov.au Received on Tue Feb 07 1995 - 00:41:14 GMT