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4,000 Anti-Scientology Videos Yanked From YouTube
An anonymous reader writes "From the EFF webpage: 'Over a period of twelve hours, between this Thursday night and Friday morning, American Rights Counsel LLC sent out over 4000 DMCA takedown notices to YouTube, all making copyright infringement claims against videos with content critical of the Church of Scientology.'"
Aren't DMCA notice senders supposed to be legally responsible for the accuracy of the notice? Where is the consequences for blatant abuse?
It's really simple - critique =/= infringement.
Correct me if I'm wrong but it's a big no-no to use the DMCA knowingly falsely, right? Not that I think anything will come of it...
By abusing the DMCA they can get slapped pretty heavy. Especially in light of the latest ruling that copyright owners must explicitly consider whether a suspected violation is fair use. Certainly if any of the folks that got harassed decide to litigate back they may well have a decent case.
Will we see DMCA Takedown notices claiming news stories like these infringe on the property of the lawyers who issued the original DMCA Takedowns? :P
Actually... I really shouldn't joke about that. It may just happen...
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
But why should they have to?
Youtube ought to have at least taken a look at the claims before just shutting everything down, surely?
Especially when the claims were coming in in such huge volumes. I don't like this, no organisation should just be able to get stuff it doesn't like removed from public fora by just claiming stuff and having a player as big as youtube just roll over and take it.
unless they already had someone on the inside...
rewriting history since 2109
Of the clear abuse the law has provided.
More examples like this and the DMCA may get repealed, castrated, or at least altered to require judge approval of each takedown notice....
Yet another reason that the DMCA is a terrible set of laws and should be stricken from the books then.
If they did not take it down because they did not believe the content infringing then they are immediately claiming/agreeing to vet the content of posts to their site. I think they may also want to claim a bit of ignorance of the content on their site,
Out of curiosity, why is it that people get bent out of shape about this 'religion'?
I got to witness an anonymous rally in San Diego about a year or so ago and it was just silly. Yes, you and I may know the whole thing is a crock, but isn't there supposed to be freedom of religion?
Not looking to start a pissing contest, I'm just wondering where people get their priorities.
Just go to http://www.xenu.net/ and all will become clear.
pi = 2*|arg(God)|
They also have to put the content back as soon as the uploader files a counter-claim.
Which makes it a far better law than not having it, in which case Youtube would have to take it down out of fear of being sued themselves, and wouldn't put it back up because they would be exposing themselves.
Here's a short breakdown.
If you go to a group of Christians, and ask questions about their beliefs, they may engage you in a debate on Christian theology, they may give you a Bible to read, and so forth, but you can generally access these materials for free. If you go a group of Muslims and do the same thing, you will likely get the same results. Same goes for the Jewish religion, or Mormonism, or Hinduism.
If you go to a Scientology center and ask questions about their beliefs, what it will come down to is "Here are some classes you can take, they cost many thousands of dollars". Scientology is not willing to give away their beliefs just as every other major religion is willing to do so. Scientology is not willing to discuss their beliefs in an open and free environment, as the other major religions are willing to do. And Scientology hides many tenets of their beliefs behind copyright and trade secret laws.
That last one is the big one. You don't officially learn about their secret beliefs until you have paid many thousands of dollars and been sufficiently indoctrinated into the Church of Scientology.
Compare that to the other religions. To the best of my knowledge, there is no super-secret ultra-eyes-only version of the Bible that only the elite Christians get to read. There is no "not for the viewing of non-believers" version of the Qu'ran that only the most devout Muslims get to read. But there are secret Scientology documents which explain core beliefs of Scientology that the general rank and file of the CoS do not have access to.
And then, when people try to promulgate that information, it irks the CoS leadership. Because, for some reason, they don't want it spread that they believe that a galactic overlord named Xenu did all the wacky poor-scripted science-fictiony things he did many millions of years ago, here on Earth. (Excuse me, it was called Teegeeack then, according to these docs.) Because then people would go, "Wow, this reads like it was written by a hack science fiction author." (Which, you know, is what the guy who founded Scientology was.)
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Part of the process of filing a counter-DMCA claim involves revealing your personal information to the party who initiated the DMCA complaint [http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hlrm=en&answer=59826]. Given the Co$'s history of harassment, perhaps this is just a way of gathering information for retribution?
This isn't religious, though. Scientology as a religion is a scam to make money. There might be people who believe in Xenu, but the people filing these DMCA notices are worried that negative press about Scientology might hamper their revenue streams.
Do the anti-Scientology posters to youtube have to reveal information about themselves to Scientology Inc. through their counter-notices? Isn't this just a way for Scientology to get the identities of the posters?
Good heavens Miss Sakamoto - you're beautiful!
This is the Church of Scientology, the group that does the fair game thing. When Google passes the counter notifications to them, they're going to know the names and addresses of everyone behind the videos.
From the article: "YouTube users responded with DMCA counter-notices. At this time, many of the suspended channels have been reinstated and many of the videos are back up."
Good for those YouTube users for responding with the counter notices.
But a counter DMCA notice requires private personal infomation (Name address etc) which is passed over to the original Claimant - Not sure if I'd like Co$ having my personal details
I'd like to think we were a stronger democracy than this too.
But I gotta believe my eyes. We The People are allowed to play our little game of self rule so long as we don't get in the way of Big Oil, Big Pharma, the Telco Gang, and the *IAAs, and so on. Which leaves us precious little to play with.
--MarkusQ
The fact that it was necessary to display "This is what scientologists actually believe" on the screen while parodying the cult of scientology on Southpark speaks volumes. This is the show that puts a nuke up Hillary Clinton's snatch and a hamster up Mr Slaves ass in front of a class of school kids.
In Christian Scriptures there is a section that says:
"Where your money is, there is your heart."
Church of Scientology seems to use this to their advantage by getting people to literally "buy in" before really telling people what they are all about.
Once you've spent $10,000 on something you are going to want to believe just so you don't lose all that money.
So give false information. Yes, that's under the penalty of perjury, but go through enough levels of proxies, and how are you going to get caught?
All religions believe that.
That's the dumbest thing I will have read today. When was the last time you heard of, say, the Quakers declaring jihad against unbelievers?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
"I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
I think you owe it to yourself and your view to read up on the CoS' various misdeeds, before you loop them in with other, more sincere religions. Their creation myth and spiritual theories are horseshit, but that is not different from other religions, and not offensive in and of itself. What the CoS does that is different, is bleed tens of thousands of dollars out of its membership while systematically mounting legal, professional, and personal attacks, many of them illegal, against those who stand in its way OR try to leave the organization.
FYI, I am a militant agnostic (I don't know that which is unknowable, and neither do you). I will wager ten US pesos that 90% of the CoS' opposition group "Anonymous" is similarly unaligned.
Posted anonymously for the above reasons. I live a mile from the local CoS headquarters and I am not sure they have anything better to do there than to harass me.
That all churches have fanatics, even if they don't require faith in a divine being
With all the activity this has generated, it seems like there would be an open source alternative to Scientology?
Don't know why I never noticed this before but Xenu backwards is Unex. Maybe a thinly disguised reference to Unix? Was L Ron a programmer, well obviously, I mean computer programmer? Perhaps he was forced to use Unix which he thought was evil and that's how he came up with Xenu?
Sounds nice except that it is not true.
The history of the bill of rights shows that (1) the inclusion of the bill of rights was a condition of ratification (See Massachusetts Compromise) and that (2) the debate over whether to include the bill of rights was not over whether those rights should be espoused but rather over whether those rights should be explicit or implicit (See Anti-federalism vs Federalism).
As you put it:
Now personally I don't have a problem with you believing any old nonsense you want to, but when it comes to filling reader's heads with this crap and forcing restrictions on one group in society over another, that's another thing.
wrong, they have money for the right kind of lawyers that make the right kind of legal motions that Branch Davidians didn't have.
The whole point of this behavior from CoS is to get to court first and often so they have the judges ear as the "injured" party. That lets them make their arguments of religious persecution first, let's them hide behind freedom of religion to conduct their business and courts tread VERY lightly when freedom of religious practice pops up. At that point alphabet agencies have to tread very lightly because the courts are already thinking that the general public might "harm" CoS. Courts then consider warrants and such much more carefully than they did at Waco or Ruby Ridge.
Money at the highest levels helps too, as the are more of a weird social club of powerful people among the rich and famous, so they can't be "that bad". Rich are used to squashing "little people" all the time so this kind of legal attack is just seen as normal business.