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------- Forwarded message follows ------- Date sent: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 11:00:36 -0800 To: politech@politechbot.com From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> Subject: FC: Slashdot responds to post about Scientologists and DMCA Send reply to: 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 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
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
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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 MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="----_=_NextPart_001_01C0AE45.EA9A96B0" X-UIDL: 2ccc511285f6d08896fcfc7a0b168429
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 Received: from NOTES_SERVER.PCIBUF.COM (smtpmail.pcibuf.com [206.232.134.2]) by smtp.well.com (8.8.5/8.8.4) with SMTP id KAA14154 for <declan@well.com>; Fri, 16 Mar 2001 10:54:55 -0800 (PST) Received: by NOTES_SERVER.PCIBUF.COM(Lotus SMTP MTA v4.6.7 (934.1 12-30-1999)) id 85256A11.0068C121 ; Fri, 16 Mar 2001 14:04:11 -0500 X-Lotus-FromDomain: PCI_BUFFALO To: declan@well.com Message-ID: <85256A11.0068BF96.00@NOTES_SERVER.PCIBUF.COM> Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 13:44:53 -0500 Subject: Re: FC: Slashdot bows to DMCA pressure from Church of Scientology Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline X-UIDL: b3fe3b905b299dfb2202888d3ed4cded
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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