Re: Kobrin Responds: Legal Action

In article <199507012035.WAA02483@utopia.hacktic.nl> Anonymous <anon-remailer@utopia.hacktic.nl> writes: [in response to an article by Diane Richardson]

[clip]

I would consider that they [Scientology unpublished materials/'trade secrets'] are in much the category as the Raising Ceremony in Freemasonry, for which various exposes exist and of which there are, in the common or mundane world, numerous accounts - some of which may be nearly accurate. Yet there has never been a case brought by the Grand Master of any regular (or irregular!) Masonic jurisdiction for relief from the publication of such works - but neither would Masons become involved in one-tenth part of the misdeeds of the various offices of the cult!

In general, the cult's knee-jerk reaction to any revelation of their 'secrets' is about as direct an indicator as to what is considered 'secret' or not as can be found. Every newby to military security is taught that the first rule of security is neither to confirm nor deny the truth of any particular statement (possibly dealing with classified material). The absence of confirmation/denial frequently enables continuing operational effectiveness despite the revelation of protected information.

My response would be that, due to their persistent and repeated abuses of various legal systems around the world which far exceed their reasonable protection of their rights to intellectual property, their copyrights should be rescinded and cancelled as a means of putting an end to such vexatious and barratous harassment of their critics.

Is there a mechanism for rescinding copyrights, other than proving someone else to be the author? In the absence of this, the proposal sounds unrealistic. What I think we need is a more effective way of addressing the legal shenanigans of an organization whose objective is to use the legal system as a mechanism for harrassment.

Moreover, the IRS should once more consider the tax-free status of the cult, and should retrospectively rescind that privilege; there's surely more than sufficient evidence to support whatever allegations of fraud, duplicity and/or false accounting on the part of various members of that cult may be needed to make such a decision valid at law.

Agree. In return for the tax preference status, and to 'compensate' the government for foregone tax revenues, non-profit organizations in the US are required to have charters that create a 'social benefit'. They are required to submit these charters, which are public documents, and they are required to review the charters regularly. Also, I believe that the financial statements and other financial documents of such organizations are public information. We should be able to find out how to get these, as a start.

+-------+ | Culex | +-------+

In Diane's original posting, which I entirely clipped in this response, she describes 'unpublished copyrights'. She and Culex then go on to explain how the distribution of these to from RTC to the orgs constitutes publication. My comment is along a little different direction.

From what I heard at the June 23 hearing, the registration for the 'unpublished copyrights' consisted of bascially a title, and everything else masked (*). If everything but the title is masked, how is a court supposed to determine if there is a copyright violation or not? Obviously they can't compare the alleged violation with the registration, since the registration is masked. Are they supposed to take the word of the plaintiff that "yes, your honor, we have compared the offending materials with ours, and they are sufficiently alike that we expect our $10,000 per violation"? Are they supposed to do the equivalent of taking the word of the plaintiff by comparing materials submitted after the presumed violation? This sounds like a real hard one, to me.

(*) in general, registration of an unpublished copyright would include sufficient non-masked information as to enable reasonable evaluation of infringement or not. This seems not to be the case with the Scientology registrations.