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Dutch Court Rules That Linking Is Legal In Scientology Case
touretzky writes "The Court of Appeal in The Hague today rejected all of Scientology's claims in appeal in Scientology's action against XS4ALL, Karin Spaink and ten other internet providers. As a result,
Karin Spaink's website, which Scientology sought to remove from the Internet based on copyright claims, is entirely legal in the Netherlands. The court also overturned two lower court rulings, one of which said that linking to material that infringed a copyright was itself actionable. The other ruling said that ISPs that failed to act on credible notification of a copyright violation could be held liable for that. The Appeals Court felt that this was too vague a standard, and thus posed a threat to free speech. More info at ScientologyWatch.org."
A religion that has trade secrets is a little frightening. And if you believe even a fraction of what the Xenu people have to tell, it's more of a public service than anything else to expose the nonsense propaganda that this organization spreads.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
Hmm... the article seems to center more on "common carrier" arguments and paraphrasing of the original work, the paraphrase of which is posted as content on the site, rather than linking, but regardless...
It amazes me that the "Church of Scientology" continues to pursue this, after the well-known Usenet debacle. I don't see how it helps their image at all, trying to force people not to discuss their "religion". This activity only adds fuel to the fire. Surely they have their share of lawyers or PR consultants on board, doesn't the basic concept of sticking to your points and ignoring/downplaying your opposition's get on the strategy table?
The disturbing part here is Scientology's continuing attempt to treat opposing views or information as derivative products of their ideas, and shut them down as if they were an IP violation. Maybe what Enron should have done is patent the concept of cooked books, and sued anyone talking about it.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
This is an amazing victory for free speech. The COS is a rich dangerous cult that is amazingly adept at using the courts to silence its victims. It really is incredable that the good guys won in this case.
Copyright is fine. Just as long as it will expire in a reasonable amount of time (20 years).
Patents are okay, too. As long as they aren't for software or "business methods".
I never understood the Plaintiff's legal logic behind these "linking" equals "copyright violation" cases. (I get the overall logic of "We are powerful. You are not. We'll make you shut-up if we don't like what you say." But, it is the logic in the legal briefs I don't get.)
As far as I am concerned the A tag of HTML is just a citation format. If the link is a copyright violation, why aren't citations made in MLA or Blue Book formats similar copyright violations? The idea extends to deep-linking cases. If deep-linking allows you to skip past the ads on a web page and is supposedly illegal because of that, why aren't pin-point citations (where you cite both the book and the page on the book where the quote is from) illegal?
I'll accept that a trade secret case could be filed, but copyright? If it is a link, it is not a copy; it is a citation, i.e. a pointer to the original "copy" of the web page.
I haven't bothered to do any research on this (because it has yet to directly affect my life). Has any defendant advanced the A tag as citation argument? Did the judge buy it?
What I don't understand is the fact that in these deep link cases, the sites didn't take any steps to prevent the deep linking through passwords ro REFERER checks...that's akin to putting a poster of information near a window in your house and suing people who walk by the window and see it. How any judge could rule in their favor is beyond me.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
How to get this site off the web...
Plan a: Sue em!
(if that doesn't work)
Plan b: Get their link posted to Slashdot..... that'll burn their serves off the net!
Seriously, I was approached by the Scientologiests a few years back (before knowing anything about them). I was a little naieve (sp?) , and signed up for a course in Dynetics... What they said seemed very plausible. The people who were running this course did seam a tad strange, almost as if they were in a daze....
After doing a search on Infoseek for dynetics, (Google wasn't around then), I was quite shocked what these people could be up to. I decided not to return, though they phoned me back loads of times trying to persuade me to.
I now consider Scientology akin to a computer virus, exploiting a flaw in the human brain, and spread from one to the next. First the brain is rooted. Trust is gained. And then, over the corse of many months, subsystem after subsystem is taken down. All for the persuit of cash. The net could well have saved me, by downloading info into my head, that prevents rooting by these people.
I can only feel sorry for those who are already taken over by this cult.
yes but no-one would be forced to use their rotten binaries.
... I don't see what that has to do with what I said. Stallman is the "GNU/Free Software" guy, remember? His primary goal is to make the source code for all software available (in fact, he wants to make it illegal to distribute something without source code -- even if I wrote the thing myself.)
He sometimes claims that his purpose is to destroy copyright, but he wants more than that -- he wants copyright replaced with a system that enforces his particular views.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
>They never call it that, but that's what all of the teachings really are.
And this is different from mainstream religion because...?
I'm not one to defend Scientology or its methods but at its core is the concept of faith, the belief of things without proof or belief from authority. ALL religions share that, thus they are very much the same e.g. authoritarian, traditional, unquestionable, abusive, controlling, etc.
A cult may be more intense but the e-meter and its wielders have nothing on days on end of meditation of the buddhist, the player schedule and diet of the muslim, or the passion of the revival christian.
The good news is that as scientology gets criticized people start to ask the question what is a cult and find it hard to rationally come to a conclusion without hurting their own faith. The more agnostics and atheists the better. Keep up the lousy work Scientology, you're acting just like Rome and your other peers except you don't have quite the backing they do. Lawyers help, but billions of believers put a million lawyers to shame.
"Personally threatened?" That's laughable. I release all my stuff under a BSD-style license, which is "freer" than the GPL -- people can do whatever the heck they want with it. Claiming that someone "feels threatened" when they disagree with something is a classic ad hominem attack.
You claim that he has "saved the world from a potentially very dark place." I don't buy it. His politics haven't done anything but create a bunch of people spouting his rhetoric. His software development has been much more successful, and I respect the amount of work he has put into it, but that doesn't mean that I have to accept his political views.
But this is way offtopic. The original discussion was "would abolishing copyright make the GPL unneccesary?" and somehow you've managed to get it to meander into condemning English-speakers for being untrusting.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
I prefer Neil Postman's view on the subject in that religion is a mechanism for providing order and context to information. Religion might seem like a crutch, but to most it is a means of imposing a comforting sense of order on to the perceived universe.
You could argue that Slashdot behaves much like religion, in that it ranks, orders, and provides emphasis on selected information. Just as Pat Robertson tells his followers that rock music consists of backwards Satanic rituals, Slashdot moderators dish out "-1, Troll" tags to me and put me below the posting threshold. Both of them have a major role in selectively sieving and censoring information.
Actually, I shouldn't compare Slashdot to religion. Slashdot IS a religion.
I totally agree with Tokerat.
If you want to restrict who accesses the information you are specifically setting up software to share to a public medium, the onus to track and authorize users should be completely your responsibility.
However, if you would place a link to another website that has this album for download, you would not be infringing copyrights or doing anything illegal whatsoever.
It boils down to, more or less, the idea that you cannot be held responsible for what others place online... which sounds like a reasonable concept to me.