Scientology and the Internet: Difference between revisions

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	On ], ], the first of a large number of anonymous messages was posted to ], containing the text of the ] known as the '']'' (OT stands for "Operating Thetan"). Included among these postings was ] (''Operating Thetan Level Three''), which gave L. Ron Hubbard's description of the "] story." This action brought on the actions of ]s representing Scientology, who contacted various newsgroup participants and posted warnings demanding that the unauthorized distribution of the OT writings cease. The lawyers described the documents as "copyrighted, ]ed, unpublished trade secrets", and the distribution of the materials as a violation of ] and ].		On ], ], the first of a large number of anonymous messages was posted to ], containing the text of the ] known as the '']'' (OT stands for "Operating Thetan"). Included among these postings was ] (''Operating Thetan Level Three''), which gave L. Ron Hubbard's description of the "] story." This action brought on the actions of ]s representing Scientology, who contacted various newsgroup participants and posted warnings demanding that the unauthorized distribution of the OT writings cease. The lawyers described the documents as "copyrighted, ]ed, unpublished trade secrets", and the distribution of the materials as a violation of ] and ].

			It is not clear that a trade secret can be protected by a copyright: the two are mutually exclusive. For example, two copies of any book or other material that is copyrighted must be deposited in the Library of Congress, where at least a few people can read or study them. To keep something secret, one must keep it secret, not show it to anybody, even the very discreet Librarian of Congress. ]

	== Attempt to remove ''alt.religion.scientology'' ==		== Attempt to remove ''alt.religion.scientology'' ==

Revision as of 05:14, 22 November 2007

v t e Scientology and the Internet
Organizations, websites	alt.religion.scientology Anonymous Chilling Effects Church of Scientology editing on Misplaced Pages FACTNet Operation Clambake Penet remailer Planetboredom Project Chanology ScienTOMogy YTMND
Software, terms	Fishman Affidavit Scamizdat Scieno Sitter Sporgery
People	Mark Bunker Tory Christman Tilman Hausherr Andreas Heldal-Lund Keith Henson Arnie Lerma Shawn Lonsdale Karin Spaink David S. Touretzky Grady Ward Lawrence Wollersheim
Litigation	Religious Technology Center v Lerma Religious Technology Center v. Netcom On-Line Communication Services, Inc.
Category:Scientology and the Internet (28) L. Ron Hubbard Scientology Church of Scientology

Scientology and the Internet have been involved in a number of disputes related to what the Church of Scientology cites as Intellectual property matters. In late 1994, the Church of Scientology began using various legal tactics to stop distribution of unpublished documents written by L. Ron Hubbard. The Church of Scientology is often accused of barratry (or malicious litigation and intimidation). The official church response is that its litigious nature is solely to protect its copyrighted works and the unpublished status of certain documents.

Some critics of the Church of Scientology say that the church is a scam and that these "secret" writings are proof. Some have said that the documents contain evidence that the Church of Scientology's medical practices are illegal and fraudulent; this has been proven in several nations' courts, although not those of the United States. Critics have said that the Church of Scientology is abusing copyright law by launching lawsuits against outspoken critics of the organization.

alt.religion.scientology

Welcome to mortal combat between two alien cultures - a flame war with real bullets.
— alt.scientology.war, Wired magazine 3.12, December 1995

The newsgroup alt.religion.scientology was created in 1991 by Scott Goehring, partly as a joke, partly for the purpose of informing the public about Scientology. Debate over the pros and cons of Scientology waxed and waned on the newsgroup through the first three years of its existence, and flame wars were common, as they were on most other newsgroups.

The online battle is generally seen to have begun with the arrival of Dennis Erlich to alt.religion.scientology in mid-1994. A former high-ranking official in the organization who had been personally affiliated with L. Ron Hubbard, Erlich's presence on the newsgroup caused a number of regular participants there to sit up and take notice.

The Xenu revelation

On December 24, 1994, the first of a large number of anonymous messages was posted to alt.religion.scientology, containing the text of the "secret" writings of Scientology known as the OT Levels (OT stands for "Operating Thetan"). Included among these postings was OT III (Operating Thetan Level Three), which gave L. Ron Hubbard's description of the "Xenu story." This action brought on the actions of lawyers representing Scientology, who contacted various newsgroup participants and posted warnings demanding that the unauthorized distribution of the OT writings cease. The lawyers described the documents as "copyrighted, trademarked, unpublished trade secrets", and the distribution of the materials as a violation of copyright law and trademark law.

It is not clear that a trade secret can be protected by a copyright: the two are mutually exclusive. For example, two copies of any book or other material that is copyrighted must be deposited in the Library of Congress, where at least a few people can read or study them. To keep something secret, one must keep it secret, not show it to anybody, even the very discreet Librarian of Congress. fact

Attempt to remove alt.religion.scientology

On January 11, 1995, Church lawyer Helena Kobrin attempted to shut down the Usenet discussion group alt.religion.scientology by sending a control message instructing Usenet servers to delete the group on the grounds that

(1) It was started with a forged message; (2) not discussed on alt.config; (3) it has the name "scientology" in its title which is a trademark and is misleading, as a.r.s. is mainly used for flamers to attack the Scientology religion; (4) it has been and continues to be heavily abused with copyright and trade secret violations and serves no purpose other than condoning these illegal practices.

In practice, this rmgroup message had little effect , since most Usenet servers are configured to disregard such messages when applied to groups that receive substantial traffic, and newgroup messages were quickly issued for those servers that did not do so. However, the issuance of the message led to a great deal of public criticism of Scientology by free-speech advocates, including hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow, who issued a declaration of war against the Church.

Raids and lawsuits

Shortly after the initial legal announcements and rmgroup attempt, representatives of Scientology followed through with a series of lawsuits against various participants on the newsgroup, including Dennis Erlich. The first raid took place on February 13, 1995. Accompanied by Scientology lawyers, federal marshals made several raids on the homes of individuals who were accused of posting Scientology's copyrighted materials to the newsgroup. Raids took place against Arnaldo Lerma (Virginia), Lawrence Wollersheim and Robert Penny of FACTNet (Colorado), and Dennis Erlich (California). Internationally, raids took place against Karin Spaink (The Netherlands) and Zenon Panoussis (Sweden). In addition to filing lawsuits against individuals, Scientology also sued The Washington Post for reprinting one paragraph of the OT writings in a newspaper article, as well as several Internet service providers, including Netcom and XS4ALL. It also regularly demanded the deletion of material from the Deja News archive.

Participants in alt.religion.scientology began using quotes from OT III in particular to publicize the online battle over the secret documents . The story of Xenu was subsequently quoted in many publications, including news reports on CNN and 60 Minutes. It became the most famous reference to the OT levels, to the point where many Internet users who were not intimately familiar with Scientology had heard the story of Xenu, and immediately associated the name with Scientology. The initial strikes against Scientology's critics settled down into a series of legal battles that raged through the courts. The Electronic Frontier Foundation provided legal assistance to several of the defendants, and daily reports of the latest happenings were posted to alt.religion.scientology. The newsgroup's popularity exploded, rocketing it to the ranks of the newsgroups with the heaviest message traffic and the highest number of readers. As the months and years wore on and the lawsuits continued without end, however, a number of participants in the newsgroup grew silent and moved on.

In the wake of the Scientology actions, the Penet remailer, which had been the most popular anonymous remailer in the world until the Scientology "war" took place, was shut down. Johan Helsingius, operator of the remailer, stated that the legal protections afforded him in his country (Finland) were too thin to protect him and he was forced to close down the remailer as a result.

Scientology's online campaign

After failing to remove the newsgroup, Scientology allegedly adopted a strategy of newsgroup spam and intimidation. Scientologists and hired third parties regularly flood the newsgroup with pro-scientology messages, vague anti-scientology messages, irrelevant comments, and accusations that other posters are secret Scientologists intent on tracking and punishing posters. This makes the newsgroup virtually unreadable via online readers such as Google Groups, although more specialized newsreading software that can filter out all messages by specific "high noise" posters make the newsgroup more usable.

While legal battles were being fought in the courts, an equally intense and aggressive campaign was waged online. The newsgroup alt.religion.scientology found itself at the center of an electronic maelstrom of information and disinformation, as the newsgroup itself was attacked both literally and figuratively. Tens of thousands of junk messages were spammed onto the newsgroup, rendering it nearly unreadable at times when the message "floods" were at their peaks. Over one million (1,000,000+) sporgery articles were injected into the newsgroup, apparently by Scientology management and staff. Lawyers representing Scientology made public appeals to Internet service providers to remove the newsgroup completely from their news servers. Furthermore, anonymous participants in the newsgroup kept up a steady stream of flame wars and off-topic arguments. Participants on the newsgroup accused Scientology of orchestrating these electronic attacks, though the organization consistently denied any wrongdoing.

In the early days of the World Wide Web, Scientology attempted a similar strategy to make finding websites critical of the organization more difficult. Scientology employed Web designers to write thousands of Web pages for their site, thus flooding early search engines. This problem was solved by the innovation of clustering responses from the same Web server, showing no more than the top two results from any one site (e.g. Google).

Since the inception of the Internet, Scientology has made a policy of using copyright infringement laws to prosecute various Scientology critics posting exposing information on the Web. The Church uses legal pressure combined with blackmail and character assassination to attempt to win many court cases in which it involves itself. On the other side of the battle, many Web-page developers have linked the words "Dianetics" and "Scientology" to Operation Clambake. This resulted in the anti-Scientology site having the highest Google index on the term for a while, which in turn resulted in Scientology persuading Google to remove links to the site until international outcry led to the links being restored. This might be considered an early example of a Google bomb, and certainly has led to interesting questions about the power and obligations of Internet search providers.

In the 1990s Scientology was distributing a special software package for its members to protect them from "unapproved" material about the church. The software is designed to completely block out the newsgroup alt.religion.scientology, various anti-Scientology web sites, and all references to various critics of Scientology. This software package was derided by critics, who accused the organization of censorship and called the program "Scieno Sitter", after the content-control software net-filter program Cyber Sitter. Since no updates have been reported since 1998 (and the original filter program only worked with Windows 95) the package is unlikely to be in use with recent operating systems and browsers due to software rot.

In June 2006, Scientology lawyers sent cease-and-desist letters to Max Goldberg, founder of the website YTMND, asking him to take down all sites that either talked about or mocked Scientology, which had recently become a fad on the site following a popular South Park episode. Goldberg responded by saying that the "claims are completely groundless and I'm not removing anything," adding to the members of the site, "it should only be a matter of time before we're sued out of existence." In response, YTMNDers created yet more sites about Scientology, and these were highlighted on the main page. They also campaigned to Google bomb "The Unfunny Truth About Scientology" site. As of May 2007, no legal action has been taken against YTMND or Goldberg.

In August 2007, MSNBC quoted Associated Press in an article on the Misplaced Pages Scanner, that Church of Scientology owned computers have been removing criticism in the Scientology entry on Misplaced Pages. A FOXNews article also reported that Church of Scientology computers had been used to delete references between Scientology and the Cult Awareness Network, in the article on the Cult Awareness Network on Misplaced Pages.

Notable legal actions

A few of the court cases were decided in favor of Scientology, while most of the cases were settled out of court. Noteworthy incidents in the later years of the online war included:

Scientology's lawsuit against ex-member Arnaldo Lerma, his provider Digital Gateway, and The Washington Post. Lerma posted the Fishman Affidavit that contained 61 pages of the allegedly trade-secret and copyrighted story of Xenu.

Zenon Panoussis, a resident of Sweden, was also sued for posting Scientology's copyrighted materials to the Internet. In his defense, he used a provision of the Constitution of Sweden that guarantees access to public documents. Panoussis turned over a copy of the NOTs documents to the office of the Swedish Parliament and, by law, copies of all documents (with few exceptions) received by authorities are available for anyone from the public to see, at any time he or she wishes. This, known as the Principle of Public Access (Offentlighetsprincipen), is considered a basic civil right in Sweden. The case, however, was decided against Panoussis. The results of his case sparked a legal firestorm in Sweden that debated the necessity of re-writing part of the Constitution.

In 1995 Scientology caused a raid on the servers of Dutch Internet provider XS4ALL and sued it and Karin Spaink for copyright violations because of citing out of some confidential materials of Scientology. There followed a summary judgment in 1995, full proceedings in 1999, an appeal in 2003 which has been upheld by the Supreme Court of Netherlands in December 2005, all in favor of the provider and Karin Spaink, putting freedom of speech above copyright in some cases.

Dennis Erlich and Scientology settled their lawsuits. Erlich withdrew from the online battle entirely, and all mention of him was removed from Church of Scientology material.

Activist Keith Henson was sued for posting a portion of Scientology's writings to the Internet. Henson defended himself in court without a lawyer, while at the same time he carried out protests and pickets against Scientology. The court found that Henson had committed copyright infringement, and the damage award against Henson was immense: $75,000, an amount which Scientology said was the largest damages ever awarded against an individual for copyright infringement. Henson's case became increasingly more complex and ongoing, with a misdemeanor conviction of interfering with religion in Riverside County, California. In his Internet writings, Henson said that he was forced to flee the United States and seek asylum in Canada due to ongoing threats against him.

Scientology is one of the first organizations to make use of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). In June of 1999, Scientology used the controversial law to force AT&T Worldnet to reveal the identity of a person who had been posting anonymously to alt.religion.scientology with the pseudonym of "Safe".

In March of 2001, legal threats from Scientology lawyers forced Slashdot to remove text from one of its discussion boards, after an excerpt from OT III was posted there. Slashdot noted this as the first time a comment had to be removed from its system due to copyright concerns.

The organization also used the DMCA to force the Google search engine to erase its entries on the popular anti-Scientology Web site Operation Clambake in March 2002, though the entry was reinstated after Google received a large number of complaints from Internet users. The publicity stemming from this incident was the impetus for Google's founding of the Chilling Effects archive, which archives legal threats of all sorts made against Internet users and Internet sites.

In September 2002, lawyers for Scientology contacted Internet Archive (archive.org), the administrators of the Wayback Machine and asserted ownership of certain materials archived as historical contents of the Operation Clambake site. In response, the Wayback Machine administration removed the archive of the entire Clambake site, initially posting a false claim that the site's author had requested its removal. This claim has been removed but (as of September 2007) the site still returns a "Blocked Site Error" from the Wayback archive.