FC: Slashdot responds to post about Scientologists and DMCA

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

[Rob is right. As much as folks online may not like it, the law is on the 
side of the Scientologists -- at least if the facts are as they appear to 
claim. If I reposted their xenuhubbardscripture on politechbot.com and got 
the same threat, I'd likely do the same thing as Slashdot did. The DMCA 
gives the Scientologists additional ammunition, but they've been at this 
for much of the last decade. I remember writing in 1995 about their 
alt.religion.scientology attacks, and I recall they sued the Washington 
Post -- and lost -- after the paper published a short fair-use excerpt of 
the xenulore. It's more important to stand together and lend our support 
the Slashdot editors when they're being hammered by such a litigious foe 
than to complain they caved in when the law was against them. Here's some 
background: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Secrets/index.html --Declan]

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Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 13:22:38 -0500
From: robin <robin () roblimo com>
Reply-To: roblimo () slashdot org
To: declan () well com
Subject: Re: FC: Slashdot bows to DMCA pressure from Church of Scientology
References: <5.0.2.1.0.20010316092232.022a8540 () mail well com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
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1) Scientology wasn't just going after us, but also after
our bandwidth provider.

2) If Slashdot was non-corporate, chances are its hosting
provider would have demanded immediate removal of the
offending post or would have closed the site down right
away.

3) If the same thing happened at Kuro5hin or [name your
favorite "anything goes" site here], they might have puffed
their chests and roared, but their hosting provider or the
upstream provider it uses for bandwidth would have cut off
access before long. Any site with enough readers to be
noticeable would have gotten in trouble for posting CoS
copyrighted material. (We're not talking about snippets used
to prove a point here, which could be argued as "fair use,"
but an entire, rather lengthy text.)

4) This is not about freedom of speech, it's about copyright
laws that we have to follow even if we don't like them. The
only real solution is to get those laws changed. And even
without the DMCA, this still would have been a copyright
violation. It is not a dubious "Iis it code or is it speec?"
situation like DeCSS or a co-opted protocol like
Kerberos/Microsoft.

5) "CmdrTaco in Jail" might be a good name for a rock opera
but would not solve the problem.

I am very depressed and have hardly slept this week.

- Robin

************

From: "Neugroschl, Scott" <Neugroschl.Scott () LittonISD com>
To: "'declan () well com'" <declan () well com>
Subject: RE: Slashdot bows to DMCA pressure from Church of Scientology
Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 10:21:27 -0800
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Declan,

As a slashdot member, I fell that I must respont to Tony's comments about 
Slashdot folding to the CoS, but not to MS.

1. The "MS" post was not copyrighted material, but a description of how to 
avoid the "click-thru" EULA on the description of the Kerberos mods.  MS 
never asserted copyright, only a violation of a trade secret.  The section 
of the DMCA that MS claimed was violated (if they claimed DMCA violation at 
all -- I don't recall) was the anti-circumvention clause, which is quite 
arguably unconstitutional under the doctrine of Fair Use.

2. The CoS post was most likely copyrighted (though possibly in the public 
domain from various court cases), and pursuant to the DMCA, the SlashDot 
editors had no choice but to take it down.

I too regret the fact that the post was removed.  What Rob Malda did, 
though, was instead of simply replacing the post with "This Post removed 
due to the DMCA", he replaced it with numerous links to information about 
Scientology and anti-Scientology sites, all the while explaining why he had 
to do this.

Yes, it sets a bad precedent, but it was necessary.

Scott Neugroschl

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From: gbrandt () pcibuf com
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Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 13:44:53 -0500
Subject: Re: FC: Slashdot bows to DMCA pressure from Church of Scientology
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One point that might be noted is that with spiders and other web agents, the
pages that were removed may still exist on the web.  I remember a story on one
of the lists that I follow where a page was removed from the host, but it was
found in the archives of google.com  I will look for this page tonight at home
and send the link to you if I find it.

Gordon Brandt

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