Scientology and the Unruly Internet
Was:
Understanding the real position of the Church of Scientology
regarding copyright of its religious scriptures
by Virginia Stuart, Office of Special Affairs
Editor's Note:
This article was submitted as a rebuttal to my own Scientology page and is published here in the interest of freedom of speech. For further details on how this article came to be published on an otherwise "critical" site, kindly refer to the original page.
For an alternate view on the effect of the DMCA, see Cory Doctorow's original rant.
Much has been said about the actions taken by the Church of Scientology in relation to copyright infringements. I have not had personal dealings with this, but have watched this and studied the ins and outs. In the noise of it all, it is clear when one searches the Internet that the story behind it has not had the opportunity to really be heard above the noise of the critics, who have derailed this whole issue into a messy, distracted topic.
The real position and the accurate facts of the Church position is way overdue from being represented in the public arena, with it sounding far better to classify the Church as somehow stopping freedom of speech, when literally nothing could be further from the truth. The history of the Church of Scientology shows it is a staunch supporter of human rights and the right to free speech. Ask any forcibly incarcerated mental institution patient who has asked for help to get their case heard and be allowed out of a system which takes away rights once it has a patient "labelled". Ask the parents of a child who was told that their child would be taken away from them by the state for neglect if they didn't agree to their child being put on mind-altering drugs. Drugs which include those now banned in the UK for causing suicide in young people. And what about the Scientologists who fought for 10 years to bring to justice the murders at Sydney's Chelmsford Hospital with 44 depressed and over-tired people to their deaths as a result of the notorious "Deep Sleep" treatment.
Great controversy is loved by the various mediums and the Internet is no different. But history has shown that behind the histrionics, lies an often different picture. As is the case with the Church of Scientology and the Internet.
One thing is clear - people who know nothing about Scientology or its history or its actions, have jumped on the band-wagon to state their two-cents. They are riled by any thought of some group "stopping" something. They resent any attempt to "stop" and often don't look into what the real deal is. What exactly are we asking to be ceased? They really don't know what is going on - they are just caught up in the well-promoted controversy. Well how about a fair deal and a fair say?
The really weird thing is that some protectors of freedom of speech identify sincere attempts to protect basic rights of our religion, with the company Microsoft of all things! Why? I don't know, but it is repeated all over the Internet. It is certainly not logical to lump every attempt to protect rights into one barrel, because not all are the same. We are not the same.
Media reports reflecting one-sided opinions and incorrect interpretations concerning the various limited cases where the Church of Scientology has requested intervention on pages containing copyright infringements have largely hidden the real issues. Thus, my clarification.
The Church of Scientology and the Internet
Scientology churches have always supported the Internet. The Church uses the Internet in its dissemination of the Scientology religion to the people of the world. We recognize the Internet as a brilliant technological advance in the field of communication; its benefits far outdistance any down sides. The latter are not inherent in the Internet but are the result of abusive or unlawful misuse of the Internet by particular individuals. And one cannot argue that such abuse does exist. It exists in any system.
The Church has established a significant multimedia Internet presence since its launch in 1996 of one of the largest and most technically advanced web sites. Why? To answer people's questions and there are more and more questions and people want access to the information from the Internet. The Scientology sites comprise more than 140,000 individual pages of material and include virtual tours of our major churches, images, multimedia files, and text. These sites are also available in most major languages, with new languages being added as fast as the translations can be done. They are visited by a million people each month.
The potential of the Internet to link individuals from all corners of the world and unify diverse cultures and nationalities makes it a priceless resource for improving understanding among the different peoples of Earth.
Abuse on the Internet
The freedom provided by the Internet is open to abuse, as the experience of the last
decade has shown. Unless certain rules are applied on the Internet, our desired global freedom
to communicate and exchange information will be corrupted by cyber-terrorism that often
masquerades as free-speech activism. And no one can deny that it exists. Limitless
It is a sad fact that it is now commonplace that when the victim tries to defend themselves, for the violator to blame the victim as somehow deserving of the treatment or violation to justify why they did it. How is this right? It is a smokescreen.
Scientology churches have taken actions to defend their rights and the rights of their members on the Internet. If the cases are inspected, one would see that Church actions are confined to two circumstances:
- Violations of the Church's intellectual property rights
- Hate speech that advocates violence against the Church or its members
While these are separate issues, they do have one notable factor in common: neither one involves "protected" free speech.
How ironic, therefore, that more often than not, when a Scientology church moves to remedy such a wrong, these unlawful infringements are immediately redefined as free speech issues. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The determination to protect copyrighted works from unlawful copyright violation has nothing to do with whether the infringing work is critical or in favour of Scientology. This is not the point or issue. Any group has critics and they likely always will. The world is a varied place, with people of different ideas, likes, opinions and many avenues to speak up on. This is what makes the world interesting and real. It is not the problem that someone has a different opinion about Scientology than we do.
The same holds true for the second phenomenon: hate speech that advocates violence.
Threatening speech or expressions calculated to incite hate enjoy no protection under the Constitution. Robust critical speech should always be sheltered by the First Amendment (as most of these issues are related to U.S. cases the U.S. Constitution is relevant), as long is it does not trample the boundaries created by law and jurisprudence in an effort to protect the people from improper verbal abuse and its adverse consequences. And with the world today, there are adverse consequences from threatening speech, which our Church and members have been subjected to, both in Australia and overseas, with the incitment proven to be the spark which gave way to physical violence.
Is it right that we should stand by and allow this to happen and our staff and churches to be threatened without asking for the same protection everyone else has the right to expect? No one could consider this unreasonable or unfair. Downright stupid not to, actually. Yet certain people who are the perpetrators of such speech protest loudly when we ask for our basic rights as citizens.
Copyright issues and the Internet
Since the founding of the first Church of Scientology in 1954, Scientology churches
around the world have consistently championed all forms of freedom. This includes being one
of the first to expose the existence of South African psychiatric slave-labor camps during the
apartheid era, and the atrocities committed on the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the name
of
The Church's own creed states that all men have inalienable rights to think freely, to talk freely, to write freely their own opinions and to counter or utter or write upon the opinions of others.
In addition, Scientologists honor free speech as a cherished right.
But free speech does not mean freedom to perpetrate a crime. No matter how
disingenuously copyright violations are presented as an exercise of free speech, the unlawful
use of protected works was, is, and will continue to be a crime. If an individual walked into a
book store and took away and sold volumes of an author's writings, or simply gave them away
as part of a super-communist phantasm designed for a shared-and-equal-wealth Utopia, would
any rational person defend this act of theft as free speech? The answer could only be
As much of this takes place in the U.S. we need to speak using their basic rights. Enshrined in the United States Constitution, and preceding the First Amendment, is an author's right to determine the manner and extent of the dissemination of his writings. The Constitution authorized Congress to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings.
Creativity is encouraged when those who engage in it can enjoy the fruits of their efforts and control the use of those creations. An author has the right to determine whether his words will be published, by whom and to what extent. In this way, intellectual property rights and free expression coexist as fundamental rights.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act provides a mechanism that helps this coexistence to be peaceful.
The religious scriptures of the Scientology religion were authored by its founder, L. Ron Hubbard. It is intellectual property. One might ask why? Inherent in our religion is the protection of the integrity of the scriptures so that they remain pure in their current form and are not altered. One only need look at the Bible and its many variations down throughout history to see how the religious texts can be altered and the information lost forever or only available to learned scholars who speak Greek or Aramaic. Modern day Christians would be very surprised indeed to learn how radically different the original Christians were to those of 2,000 years on. Whilst the Bible has no author and is essentially a collection of stories throughout the ages, in complete contrast, Scientology scriptures are the writings of one man and modern-day copyright law covers these works. While protection of scripture from alteration may be a new idea, Scientology itself is a new religion, with an exact technology and methodology for spiritual improvement. It is a religion of the 20th Century and thus the social factors apply to it now and one cannot treat it in the same manner of earlier religions from thousands of years ago.
When it became obvious during the last decade that copyright owner's determination was being tested by a spate of unauthorized distribution of their works over the Internet, the importance of protecting both copyright owners and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from potential adverse consequences became glaringly evident.
In a landmark lawsuit brought by two Scientology-affiliated organizations, the US District Court for the Northern District of California agreed with their contention that ISPs may be liable for contributory copyright infringement once they are made aware that infringements are maintained on their systems. The judge's ruling resulted in a notice-and-takedown procedure to remedy copyright infringements.
Note that it was not because they were critical of Scientology, but that they violated copyright law. It is not and never has been a free speech issue.
Google chills
In March 2002, acting according to the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Church asked Google to remove their links to certain specific copyright infringements. Google responded by eliminating the links. These actions on both sides were routine and carried out pursuant to the DMCA.
However, this time the often unpredictable currents of the Internet pushed Google out of the routine and into a storm of protest. Taken aback by this reaction, Google rapidly moved to put the Church's cease and desist letters up on a public website. If the intent of this action was to appear politically correct or to chill the Church's dedication to defend the copyrighted works of the Scientology religion, no adverse affect has been created. In fact, the Church views it favorably that anyone who is interested can see the letters for themselves, uninfluenced by the hysterical rhetoric that was used by some media to mischaracterize their content and import.
We are scarcely alone in utilizing copyright law to protect our intellectual properties, so it is oddly disproportionate that so much attention has been focused on the handful sent out by Scientology churches.
Free speech vs. hate speech
It has long been an established legal principle that clearly open incitement to violence against another is not protected by either the U.S. First Amendment, nor current Australian law -- on or off the Internet.
If an individual shouted from his rooftop that he was going to throw a bomb through his neighbor's window, no one would accuse the intended victim of attempting to stifle free speech when he called the police.
Hate speech is also a factor that often motivates the Church in its actions. Unfortunately it usually remains unreported by media, thus depriving the public of the full picture.
It has been necessary to take legal action on several occasions due to threats and actual violence against our churches. Hate speech and extremist propaganda on the Internet have repeatedly driven unstable individuals to commit felonious acts against Church members and Church property, as in these examples:
- A Scientology Church was fire-bombed twice with a dozen molotov cocktails doing extensive damage to the front of the church.
- A staff member was stalked and shot at.
- A crazed gunman went into a church and shot a pregnant staff member whose unborn child suffered fatal birth defects and later died. The woman is now paralyzed. He then set fire to the building and took another female staff member hostage.
- Individuals became inflamed by venom spewed online and then sent out death threats.
- An individual was convicted for threatening and intimidating Scientologists through the Internet. He then fled the country to avoid sentencing.
- Police intercepted a man with explosives in his van, who, it was discovered by the officers, was enroute to assassinate the president of a Church of Scientology.
- A man constructed a mail bomb and hid it in one of our churches. It was detected and defused before it went off.
If these acts are carried out against Western citizens by Al Qaeda, it is called terrorism.
Within the microcosm of the alternative newsgroups, Scientologists face a form of unadulterated cyber-terrorism, no matter how loudly its perpetrators try to disguise themselves as "free speech" advocates.
Ultimately, the only guarantee of safeguarding the Internet's potential resides with all who use it. We share the responsibility of ensuring that abuses by a largely lawless minority are not permitted to burden all of us with over regulation. We submit that had it not been for a few lawless individuals, online copyright regulation would not even have been necessary as ample copyright law already existed. It is up to the law-abiding majority to ensure the Internet remains truly free.