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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?
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.
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)|
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.
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!
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