I can't speak for Keith's situation or his personal feelings or financial situation, but, in general, he's done pretty much exactly what the Scientologists wanted him to do: Go away and shut up.
He hasn't shut up, and in the day of the Internet, he hasn't even gone "away" since there is no "away."
In fact, this one action has created more publicity for his case than the months of relatively quiet and local human rights activism which prompted the original charges.
While I can't say what I think of the likelihood of success in this action, and in fact it could end him up in an even worse situation than where he started, going away and shutting up are two things that Keith Henson are not about. He is not about sitting still and having a gag shoved in his mouth, or getting beaten up or killed in a prison with a strong presence of Scientologists in the form of recruitees into the front group Scientology operates in prisons, Criminon.
For months before this verdict, the Scientologists were boasting about how they had total control of the situation and how they were getting Keith "just where they wanted him."
Canada is not where they want him.
Whether or not it's worth the ultimate fallout that it will cause, Henson has managed to turn his local and limited publicity activism, and his prosecution by an obscure and corrupt District Attorney's office (Riverside DA Grover Trask is disreputable) into an international incident and involve more government bodies.
What has happened here will now receive at least some of the scrutiny it deserves. Henson has not fled in a cowardly fashion, otherwise he would not be so noisy about it. How many fugitives post their address and phone number to the Internet and invite press and government scrutiny of their actions? That's not the action of a guilty man fleeing.
What has happened here stinks on ice, and can not withstand broad scrutiny. Even if Henson later gets transported back to the United States and ends up being sentenced, the court which ends up with the case will be under tremendous scrutiny to handle the proceedings fairly, and further kangaroo court tactics will not be tolerated or ignored.
What has happened here was only allowed because it was a backwater court in a corrupt district, with a corrupt District Attorney, who was allowed to get away with murder. Let's see if Deputy District Attorney Robert K. Schwarz is so willing to be visibly the pawn of Scientology with the world watching.
What has happened here was only able to occur because the obscure Deputy District Attorney Robert K. Schwarz was backed up by Scientology lawyers Elliott Abelson and Samuel D. Rosen, who openly coached the DA's every action, standing behind him in court and whispering into his ear, and apparently pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars worth into free legal aid to the DA's office. What the hell kind of situation is it where a criminally convicted organization like Scientology can essentially act as its own private District Attorney's office and use a state actor like a DA's office as a proxy to make its own law?
What has happened here needs this continued publicity lest it continue to happen.
Henson has brought that scrutiny to bear, but it will be allowed to pass without action.
So far as I can tell, he is not a political prisoner by any stretch of the imagination.
That's true. To be a political prisoner, he'd have to be a prisoner first. For the moment, at least, he has avoided that.
He was accused of a crime, and after a full trial, a jury unanimously found him guilty. If his problem is with the form of the trial, he has remedies in the United States, far more powerful than would any convict in any other nation in the World. He instead decided to abuse the freedoms he had and left the nation.
Time will tell. Frankly I'm somewhat pessimistic. However, the problem is not just with the "form" of the trial, although that itself was highly questionable. The problem is that there is no way he could effectively have appealed it. He was not only denied effective and experienced counsel versus Scientology, but the best person to serve as his witness, Gerry Armstrong had himself been gagged and driven out of the country by similar means years ago. Not to mention that his preferred counsel, Graham Berry, was also driven out of practice and nearly out of his mind by years of harassment as detailed in this motion to withdraw.
Further, he would have had to appeal from jail, in all likelihood. He has essentially been bankrupted, and while he still has a house, it's too encumbered to borrow from, and there's no way to get a line of credit. He'd have needed $25,000 bottom line just to get it into court and file need appeal briefs, and that is if Scientology didn't somehow snatch the money in bankruptcy proceedings related to other litigation, which they've done before.
In the bankruptcy case, for example, they've spent over a million bucks in a case where they stand to collect at most $75,000. Even his ex-counsel Berry had his car seized in similar bankruptcy proceedings, despite the car being a rustbucket not worth a thousand dollars at most.
While you are correct about the legalities here, and in fact Keith has basically given them short shrift, you also highly underestimate the effects a compromised legal system can give to those who are willing to spend literally any quantity of money in order to achieve their goals.
While it's nice to pretend that there's justice in the United States, it's basically a money-operated machine. If you have fifty million to throw at it every year, you get whatever you want, and can grind anyone to dirt with it, deny them effective counsel, deny them witnesses, deny them a trial, and in this case, even keep them in a jail filled with your own people.
Frankly I don't think Henson would have even gotten out of jail alive had he been there, much less to a successful appeal.
Incidentally the charges against him were not federal. They were California criminal statute--422.6.
This site references all currently available court docs, but note that many (including the full transcript of the trial) and sentencing report (one exhibit alone is 252 pages), are not yet OCR'ed and scanned. This happened just yesterday, and these take time.
However, all the important motions and rulings are there. If you go through the site, whenever I reference a motion, the link is to the motion itself or to a draft version if the original was not available.
The site will continue to be updated as events unfold, including Henson's latest actions, which apparently will be in Canada, to almost everyone's surprise.
If you say so. By fleeing the country as a fugitive, being never able to return absent a grant of amnesty for both the underlying crime AND the crime of running, he simply becomes the poster child that the CoS can muscle you out of anywhere -- even the United States.
Yes, that's true. However, Keith isn't the first. There's also Gerry Armstrong. They've been doing this for years. It should be publicized. I think that fact, itself, that Scientology can even drive a critic out of the United States, is worthy of note.
I think your other points about the possible wisdom of this move are valid, and that this maneuver of Henson's has the potential to be spectacularly disastrous. However, in Henson's view he essentially had no other choice but spending the year in jail--any appeal would be hopelessly delayed, with him serving the full time regardless of the outcome.
I can honestly see his view of saying "Fuck that" and at least making sure that any penalty he suffers will be widely publicized.
The site should be mirrored at
http://freehenson.da.ru
the base url I have generally used as I imagined something would take the site down at some point.
Thanks to jcr, Don NOTS and others. As of 1742 EST the current best mirror is at the google cache in the Topic, but within 20-30 minutes it should be the original URL, http://freehenson.da.ru.
The document posted on here was a full document, and thus, not under fair use.
Not entirely true. It's about 10% of the OT III course. There's a lot of other stuff, too. It's probably an infringement, though.
As well, when we had been sued, all of the server logs would have been taken.
Actually they could get the relevant portions without even filing a suit. Read the DMCA section entitled "Subpoena to Identify Infringer."
The anonymous coward would have been identified and taken. Moreover, under DMCA, we are liable.
Actually, you were liable under existing copyright law prior to DMCA. The DMCA just provides an escape hatch.
That's how it works. Next time, read the summary of the DMCA before posting.
I can't say I blame Slashdot for removing the posting. These materials are everywhere anyway, regardless of what the archaic and antiquated copyright laws say. Scientology is just a great example of precisely *why* these laws are fucked. People have a right to know what kind of gibberish they're going to be brainwashed into believing *before* they join a cult or a "religion." People have a right to know what kind of code they're buying *before* they buy it. People have the right to decrypt DVDs they buy and use them on any operating system.
Copyright law basically says this is all illegal. Fuck copyright law. But do it in a favorable jurisdiction. Unfortunately Slashdot has to exist in an oppressive jurisdiction which is trying to force stupid laws like this down the throat of the rest of the world.
All I can say is the only hope we have now is foreign jurisdictions. America and American IP law is deeply, hopelessly fucked and nothing short of smashing it all will solve anything. Death to the "Intellectual Property" mafia, of whom the Scientology crime cult is only one of the more obnoxious representatives.
How come so many Scientologists and Scientology supporters have criminal
records? How come so many of them are losers who are taking their personal
frustration out on the critics of their crimes?
We have Founder L. Ron Hubbard with his criminal conviction for petty theft for
passing bad checks and with a record of wife-beating and drug abuse, who
died on psych drugs while hiding from the authorities. Not only did his ex-wife
and his own son describe him as a "paranoid schizophrenic" but a judge even
described the cult he founded as "paranoid and schizophrenic" and stated that
this was a "reflection of its founder." Among his other crimes, L. Ron Hubbard
was sentenced to four years of prison for fraud by a French court, but he
remained a fugitive from this charge as well.
Hubbard was also a child abuser, who forced his son L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. to take phenobarbitol and who was fined $50 and sentenced to probation for abandoning his own daughter in a vehicle.
Then we have L. Ron Hubbard's third wife Mary Sue Hubbard, who was convicted of
felonies and served jail time for helping her husband mastermind the biggest
domestic espionage case in American history, involving burglarizing government
offices routinely and committing other crimes. Even her own lawyers admitted
that she had committed these crimes, as well as 11 other Scientologists who
were convicted of crimes including felonies.
Next comes the President of the cult he founded, Heber Jentzsch, who has just
recently skipped out on a million dollars bail for felonies in Spain, making him
a fugitive from justice and persona non grata in all of Europe. A habitual
liar, who constantly claims that his cult has eight million members, this
criminal can be seen in handcuffs all around the net, and can accurately be
described as a bail-jumping felon.
Could someone explain how could a judge have this kind of authority?
Hadn't you heard that judges have more power than God? It's true.
More seriously, a judge with a valid reason to suspect a pattern of frivolous litigation and forum shopping is within his rights to demand that all further similar cases from the same litigant be taken to his court.
This is not a common remedy, but it is not unheard of either. It is especially likely when a litigant shows a pattern of such conduct, and is meant to defeat the tactic.
An instance I can think of is that the famously irascible Judge Manuel Real of the Central District Court of California (most famous for ordering Larry Flynt chucked in a psychiatric prison for spitting at him and showering him with obscenities) once ordered the crime cult of Scientology to bring all cases in the District to his court and no other. He also had a Scientology cult attorney chucked in prison that same day for contempt.
Brazen forum-shopping has become almost a sacrament for American litigants, despite the fact that it is purportedly a violation of legal ethics to do this.
It is nice to see there is at least one jurist out there who still insists on upholding standards of ethical conduct in the law and is not afraid to throw his weight around in the pursuit of justice.
I only wish he could have slapped them harder. These repugnant swine with their incessant intellectual property law-based attacks on innovation in the computer industry, ludicrous patents and outrageous claims of ownership of everything under the sun have had their day for far too long, and I hope for a day when they are treated as the swine they are.
Remember the strip where Oliver Wendell Jones
hacked the ticker at the NYSE to say "Avast ye scurvy dogs, Bank of America is about to go belly up!"
That's the most obvious use of this, and it appears that in this case, even a pathetically crude and transparent fraud managed to cause significant damage, though it appears they caught the perp.
Even a teenager has been able to pull off a scam of this sort. This article in The Standard has the story of a teenager caught manipulating stock prices, who was ordered to pay back his illegal profits after he got caught.
Now this is an inexperienced kid, and another idiot who apparently made his transactions transparently obvious and got caught. We only hear about the ones who get caught, and I highly doubt these guys are the only ones doing it. They're just the only ones dumb enough to make it so transparent.
If you send the email to another Hushmail user, it never leaves their servers. They themselves admit that the email is no longer secure if you send it to someone outside of Hushmail. Do you know how Hushmail works?
I happen to know that the data you type in to your email does not just magically jump through the air through TCP/IP by Magic Fairy, and therefore the data itself, as well as the face you were connected to hushmail, is obvious to anyone sniffing traffic. What's the security? https? Yeah right.
register your company name and address as an ISP under the DMCA
do nothing unless you receive a sworn statement under penalty of perjury that the person is infringing copyright law.
if you get that, take the site down and/or contact a lawyer if you want to fight it
If you want to get really fancy, have a form on your website both for notifications and counternotifications and automate the process. If click-wraps work, then that might too! IANAL.
According to Amway, P&G was funding Schwartz's site, which Schwartz denies. Due to the legal battle, Schwartz finally took his site down, although it is still mirrored heavily around the world. Despite the fact that Amway and their lawyers were never able to answer Schwartz's challenge to point out even one single incorrect statement on his site, he was effectively silenced by Amway's continued litigation. They didn't need to win in court.
Scamway is a litigious cult on the level of $cientology. Like all scams, they can't survive when the truth about their scam is freely available. However, they know that it's very easy for a large corporation to outspend a single individual and litigate them to utter financial destruction regardless of the merits of the case.
Welcome to Amerika. How much freedom can you afford?
2600 themselves had the DeCSS code on their site, so they were responsible. I am an ISP. If one of my users posts the DeCSS code on their home page, I am not responsible nor liable. A Cease and Desist letter from MPAA would not be cause of concern to me. But it would be of concern to the user.
IANAL, but my opinion is to let anything go, make your posters know that they should not post copyright materials, and when a copyright holder gets in touch with you about a posting, and can prove that they hold the rights, and they request that it be removed, then comply.
They don't have to prove they hold the rights, just submit a sworn statement under penalty of perjury that they do. At least if you're trying to be within the safe harbor provisions of DMCA. You don't need to do this but it saves you lawsuits from thugs, lunatics and Scientologists (but I repeat myself.)
There are over 40+ computers and no way to tell who was using them. Bamo no one to blame and no one to trace.
Ever heard of fingerprints?
Further if you log into anything you intend to log into again from the same or a similar site, if it involves a sufficient level of illegality, all they have to do is wait for you to connect again, then swoop down on whichever one of the 40 terminals you're at.
This will work for some apps, but for real security it's a joke.
Specifically policing content is a terrible idea. Further, you don't even have to do that to get immunity from copyright suits.
You need to have a copyright page, and that page needs to have a DMCA agent, which can be you, if you have a clue and don't want to pay a designated legal agent by the hour to wade through kook mail. This should include your name, address for service of legal papers, telephone and/or fax number, email address, PGP key and any other means of contacting you.
The full details of this are available at Bitlaw and the statute is 17 USC 512.
(2)
Designated agent. The limitations on liability established in this subsection apply to a service provider only if the service provider has designated an agent to receive notifications of claimed infringement described in paragraph (3), by making available through its service, including on its website in a location accessible to the public, and by providing to the Copyright Office, substantially the following information:
(A)
the name, address, phone number, and electronic mail address of the agent.
(B)
other contact information which the Register of Copyrights may deem appropriate. The Register of Copyrights shall maintain a current directory of agents available to the public for inspection, including through the Internet, in both electronic and hard copy formats, and may require payment of a fee by service providers to cover the costs of maintaining the directory.
Now here's the bitch. Any complaint, no matter how ill-founded, must result in the removal of the disputed material, so long as it fully complies with the proper format for a DMCA notification, that is:
(3)
Elements of notification.
(A)
To be effective under this subsection, a notification of claimed infringement must be a written communication provided to the designated agent of a service provider that includes substantially the following:
(i)
A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
(ii)
Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site.
(iii)
Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity and that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to locate the material.
(iv)
Information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to contact the complaining party, such as an address, telephone number, and, if available, an electronic mail address at which the complaining party may be contacted.
(v)
A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
(vi)
A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
However, if the original poster of the material sends a counternotification, basically adhering to the same conventions, you can put the material right back up and then the complaining party has to sue the actual poster of the information or shut the fuck up.
Actually, they can conceivably just keep sending further complaints about the same material and forcing this tango to occur over and over again; it's not yet determined whether or not they can get away with it.
In *either* case, though, they can't sue *YOU*. At all. And this does NOT require you to police anything, only to act when given ACTUAL and CONSTRUCTIVE notice adhering to a specific format.
There is, by the way, no legal requirement that you actually have a DMCA Agent or comply with cease-and-desist orders you think are BS. The only problem with this is that you can then actually be sued and forced to defend yourself. DMCA also does not negate any legal defenses such as "Fair Use" that may exist under prior law, whether or not you choose to have an agent.
It just immunizes you as a service provider from the inevitable kook suits that occur when you give free rein to Joe Nutbag to post to your website anonymously or otherwise.
If someone creates content (i.e. music), they have the right to put whatever restrictions they like, through the use of copyright and license agreements.
No it doesn't.
Excessive or illegal restrictions on the licensing of intellectual property can and has been construed as "copyright misuse" and has caused the IP owner to lose copyright infringement actions.
See this article for information on the Lasercomb case and others in which this has occurred. Specifically, licensing agreements forbidding reverse engineering are covered by this.
This is why the Microsoft EULA says this:
Limitations on Reverse Engineering, Decompilation, and Disassembly. You may not reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the SOFTWARE PRODUCT, except and only to the extent that such activity is expressly permitted by applicable law notwithstanding this limitation.
Bolds mine. It wouldn't have that added disclaimer if it would be illegal for them to forbid it outright, since they'd love to do that.
The bottom line here is that RIAA and Napster are BOTH thieves, Napster just hasn't admitted it yet.
These recording moguls have already admitted and settled out of court for hundreds of millions they bilked the American consumer out of with illegal price-fixing schemes. If IP laws (which are nearly fictional in their moral authority) are to be obeyed then so are trade laws. Of course if you can afford enough lawyers you can afford to ignore the law and just cough up a nice hefty bribe to buy a few senators and change the laws.
This lawsuit is not about criminality, but about who gets a nicer slice of the swag. Eventually like mp3.com the RIAA will force Napster into a settlement, because they're the older and more well-established pack of thieves.
As for RIAA, fuck them. These bastards have pushed for decades to create new copyright legislation that extends copyrights nearly indefinitely, which amounts to wholesale theft from the public domain. Essentially, if they get their way, there WILL be no public domain. I consider it total war and basically anything goes. Hell with them.
They'd gladly wipe out freedom of speech or any chance of privacy in order to achieve their goals which they cloak in the flowery rhetoric of "responsibility" and "property" but which really means total control, forever, of everything "intellectual."
If given the choice between one word of free speech and all the intellectual property in the world, my choice is burn it all, fuck it, we don't need it.
i assert that the licensing model is NOT appropriate, i suppose i should have been more clear on that in my original post. it makes no sense in general that if something, say an album that takes a few days for a recording group to create (and really, they can bust em out that fast), has work put into it one time, it seems logical that the producers/artists should receive appropriate payment one time.
That's bogus because it is hardly ever that someone knows an "appropriate payment" at the moment the work is created. Britney Spears albums make millions of bucks when really the "appropriate payment" for these crimes against art would be a horsewhipping, whereas the author of Moby Dick doesn't get diddly because he's dead by the time anyone noticed his work is worth anything.
I suppose you could have some sort of Communist model of intellectual property where a group of apparatchiks decide what is important art and what is an appropriate payment, but the current system, as stupid as it is, is probably preferable to that.
Slashdot Mirror
Freehenson website BACK UP after a savage slashdotting
FREE HENSON
I can't speak for Keith's situation or his personal feelings or financial situation, but, in general, he's done pretty much exactly what the Scientologists wanted him to do: Go away and shut up.
He hasn't shut up, and in the day of the Internet, he hasn't even gone "away" since there is no "away."
In fact, this one action has created more publicity for his case than the months of relatively quiet and local human rights activism which prompted the original charges.
While I can't say what I think of the likelihood of success in this action, and in fact it could end him up in an even worse situation than where he started, going away and shutting up are two things that Keith Henson are not about. He is not about sitting still and having a gag shoved in his mouth, or getting beaten up or killed in a prison with a strong presence of Scientologists in the form of recruitees into the front group Scientology operates in prisons, Criminon.
For months before this verdict, the Scientologists were boasting about how they had total control of the situation and how they were getting Keith "just where they wanted him."
Canada is not where they want him.
Whether or not it's worth the ultimate fallout that it will cause, Henson has managed to turn his local and limited publicity activism, and his prosecution by an obscure and corrupt District Attorney's office (Riverside DA Grover Trask is disreputable) into an international incident and involve more government bodies.
What has happened here will now receive at least some of the scrutiny it deserves. Henson has not fled in a cowardly fashion, otherwise he would not be so noisy about it. How many fugitives post their address and phone number to the Internet and invite press and government scrutiny of their actions? That's not the action of a guilty man fleeing.
What has happened here stinks on ice, and can not withstand broad scrutiny. Even if Henson later gets transported back to the United States and ends up being sentenced, the court which ends up with the case will be under tremendous scrutiny to handle the proceedings fairly, and further kangaroo court tactics will not be tolerated or ignored.
What has happened here was only allowed because it was a backwater court in a corrupt district, with a corrupt District Attorney, who was allowed to get away with murder. Let's see if Deputy District Attorney Robert K. Schwarz is so willing to be visibly the pawn of Scientology with the world watching.
What has happened here was only able to occur because the obscure Deputy District Attorney Robert K. Schwarz was backed up by Scientology lawyers Elliott Abelson and Samuel D. Rosen, who openly coached the DA's every action, standing behind him in court and whispering into his ear, and apparently pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars worth into free legal aid to the DA's office. What the hell kind of situation is it where a criminally convicted organization like Scientology can essentially act as its own private District Attorney's office and use a state actor like a DA's office as a proxy to make its own law?
What has happened here needs this continued publicity lest it continue to happen.
Henson has brought that scrutiny to bear, but it will be allowed to pass without action.
Free Keith Henson!
Original Keith Henson site back up at http://freehenson.da.ru or http://www.operatingthetan.com thanks to the nice people at http://www.dis.org
So far as I can tell, he is not a political prisoner by any stretch of the imagination.
That's true. To be a political prisoner, he'd have to be a prisoner first. For the moment, at least, he has avoided that.
He was accused of a crime, and after a full trial, a jury unanimously found him guilty. If his problem is with the form of the trial, he has remedies in the United States, far more powerful than would any convict in any other nation in the World. He instead decided to abuse the freedoms he had and left the nation.
Time will tell. Frankly I'm somewhat pessimistic. However, the problem is not just with the "form" of the trial, although that itself was highly questionable. The problem is that there is no way he could effectively have appealed it. He was not only denied effective and experienced counsel versus Scientology, but the best person to serve as his witness, Gerry Armstrong had himself been gagged and driven out of the country by similar means years ago. Not to mention that his preferred counsel, Graham Berry, was also driven out of practice and nearly out of his mind by years of harassment as detailed in this motion to withdraw.
Further, he would have had to appeal from jail, in all likelihood. He has essentially been bankrupted, and while he still has a house, it's too encumbered to borrow from, and there's no way to get a line of credit. He'd have needed $25,000 bottom line just to get it into court and file need appeal briefs, and that is if Scientology didn't somehow snatch the money in bankruptcy proceedings related to other litigation, which they've done before.
In the bankruptcy case, for example, they've spent over a million bucks in a case where they stand to collect at most $75,000. Even his ex-counsel Berry had his car seized in similar bankruptcy proceedings, despite the car being a rustbucket not worth a thousand dollars at most.
While you are correct about the legalities here, and in fact Keith has basically given them short shrift, you also highly underestimate the effects a compromised legal system can give to those who are willing to spend literally any quantity of money in order to achieve their goals.
While it's nice to pretend that there's justice in the United States, it's basically a money-operated machine. If you have fifty million to throw at it every year, you get whatever you want, and can grind anyone to dirt with it, deny them effective counsel, deny them witnesses, deny them a trial, and in this case, even keep them in a jail filled with your own people.
Frankly I don't think Henson would have even gotten out of jail alive had he been there, much less to a successful appeal.
Incidentally the charges against him were not federal. They were California criminal statute--422.6.
All I see is Henson's site (which we can't see anymore) and a couple references to california law.
It's back up thanks to the folks at dis.org. See here: http://www.operatingthetan.com
The original redirector also now points to the operational site, updated as of this morning, http://freehenson.da.ru
This site references all currently available court docs, but note that many (including the full transcript of the trial) and sentencing report (one exhibit alone is 252 pages), are not yet OCR'ed and scanned. This happened just yesterday, and these take time.
However, all the important motions and rulings are there. If you go through the site, whenever I reference a motion, the link is to the motion itself or to a draft version if the original was not available.
The site will continue to be updated as events unfold, including Henson's latest actions, which apparently will be in Canada, to almost everyone's surprise.
If you say so. By fleeing the country as a fugitive, being never able to return absent a grant of amnesty for both the underlying crime AND the crime of running, he simply becomes the poster child that the CoS can muscle you out of anywhere -- even the United States.
Yes, that's true. However, Keith isn't the first. There's also Gerry Armstrong. They've been doing this for years. It should be publicized. I think that fact, itself, that Scientology can even drive a critic out of the United States, is worthy of note.
I think your other points about the possible wisdom of this move are valid, and that this maneuver of Henson's has the potential to be spectacularly disastrous. However, in Henson's view he essentially had no other choice but spending the year in jail--any appeal would be hopelessly delayed, with him serving the full time regardless of the outcome.
I can honestly see his view of saying "Fuck that" and at least making sure that any penalty he suffers will be widely publicized.
Thank you to the kind folks at dis.org, Don NOTS, and others.
The site is accessible from its original location at http://freehenson.da.ru as well as its new location at http://www.operatingthetan.com.
This site will withstand all traffic.
The whole site should be mirrored there soon, and currently redirects to http://www.operatingthetan.com.
Thanks to jcr, Don NOTS and others. As of 1742 EST the current best mirror is at the google cache in the Topic, but within 20-30 minutes it should be the original URL, http://freehenson.da.ru.
This depresses the fuck out of me.
I could think of so many other people I'd prefer to have died.
The document posted on here was a full document, and thus, not under fair use.
Not entirely true. It's about 10% of the OT III course. There's a lot of other stuff, too. It's probably an infringement, though.
As well, when we had been sued, all of the server logs would have been taken.
Actually they could get the relevant portions without even filing a suit. Read the DMCA section entitled "Subpoena to Identify Infringer."
The anonymous coward would have been identified and taken. Moreover, under DMCA, we are liable.
Actually, you were liable under existing copyright law prior to DMCA. The DMCA just provides an escape hatch.
That's how it works. Next time, read the summary of the DMCA before posting.
I can't say I blame Slashdot for removing the posting. These materials are everywhere anyway, regardless of what the archaic and antiquated copyright laws say. Scientology is just a great example of precisely *why* these laws are fucked. People have a right to know what kind of gibberish they're going to be brainwashed into believing *before* they join a cult or a "religion." People have a right to know what kind of code they're buying *before* they buy it. People have the right to decrypt DVDs they buy and use them on any operating system.
Copyright law basically says this is all illegal. Fuck copyright law. But do it in a favorable jurisdiction. Unfortunately Slashdot has to exist in an oppressive jurisdiction which is trying to force stupid laws like this down the throat of the rest of the world.
All I can say is the only hope we have now is foreign jurisdictions. America and American IP law is deeply, hopelessly fucked and nothing short of smashing it all will solve anything. Death to the "Intellectual Property" mafia, of whom the Scientology crime cult is only one of the more obnoxious representatives.
How come so many Scientologists and Scientology supporters have criminal records? How come so many of them are losers who are taking their personal frustration out on the critics of their crimes?
We have Founder L. Ron Hubbard with his criminal conviction for petty theft for passing bad checks and with a record of wife-beating and drug abuse, who died on psych drugs while hiding from the authorities. Not only did his ex-wife and his own son describe him as a "paranoid schizophrenic" but a judge even described the cult he founded as "paranoid and schizophrenic" and stated that this was a "reflection of its founder." Among his other crimes, L. Ron Hubbard was sentenced to four years of prison for fraud by a French court, but he remained a fugitive from this charge as well.
Hubbard was also a child abuser, who forced his son L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. to take phenobarbitol and who was fined $50 and sentenced to probation for abandoning his own daughter in a vehicle.
Theft conviction
Wife-beating and drug abuse
Death on psych drugs coroner report
Described as a "paranoid schizophrenic" by ex-wife
Described as a "paranoid, schizophrenic megalomaniac" by his own son
Described as "schizophrenic and paranoid" by judge
Convicted of fraud and sentenced to four years in prison
Fined and put on probation for abandoning his daughter in a vehicle
Forced his own son to take drugs
Then we have L. Ron Hubbard's third wife Mary Sue Hubbard, who was convicted of felonies and served jail time for helping her husband mastermind the biggest domestic espionage case in American history, involving burglarizing government offices routinely and committing other crimes. Even her own lawyers admitted that she had committed these crimes, as well as 11 other Scientologists who were convicted of crimes including felonies.
Sentencing memorandum describing crimes as "heinous and vicious"
Stipulation of evidence admitting to multiple felonies by Hubbard and other defendants
Next comes the President of the cult he founded, Heber Jentzsch, who has just recently skipped out on a million dollars bail for felonies in Spain, making him a fugitive from justice and persona non grata in all of Europe. A habitual liar, who constantly claims that his cult has eight million members, this criminal can be seen in handcuffs all around the net, and can accurately be described as a bail-jumping felon.
Heber Jentzsch Spanish criminal charges
Could someone explain how could a judge have this kind of authority?
Hadn't you heard that judges have more power than God? It's true.
More seriously, a judge with a valid reason to suspect a pattern of frivolous litigation and forum shopping is within his rights to demand that all further similar cases from the same litigant be taken to his court.
This is not a common remedy, but it is not unheard of either. It is especially likely when a litigant shows a pattern of such conduct, and is meant to defeat the tactic.
An instance I can think of is that the famously irascible Judge Manuel Real of the Central District Court of California (most famous for ordering Larry Flynt chucked in a psychiatric prison for spitting at him and showering him with obscenities) once ordered the crime cult of Scientology to bring all cases in the District to his court and no other. He also had a Scientology cult attorney chucked in prison that same day for contempt.
Brazen forum-shopping has become almost a sacrament for American litigants, despite the fact that it is purportedly a violation of legal ethics to do this.
It is nice to see there is at least one jurist out there who still insists on upholding standards of ethical conduct in the law and is not afraid to throw his weight around in the pursuit of justice.
I only wish he could have slapped them harder. These repugnant swine with their incessant intellectual property law-based attacks on innovation in the computer industry, ludicrous patents and outrageous claims of ownership of everything under the sun have had their day for far too long, and I hope for a day when they are treated as the swine they are.
This is a step in the right direction.
Yeah, but the combination of
- Thin air that doesn't carry conversation all that well, and
- The sonic boom obliterating any noise that does carry
I don't think she's going to be talking much.There'd be another problem, which would be that she'd be within line-of-sight of more than one cell at a time, which is problematic.
Anyone who has probably knows why I'm interested.
That's the most obvious use of this, and it appears that in this case, even a pathetically crude and transparent fraud managed to cause significant damage, though it appears they caught the perp.
Even a teenager has been able to pull off a scam of this sort. This article in The Standard has the story of a teenager caught manipulating stock prices, who was ordered to pay back his illegal profits after he got caught.
Now this is an inexperienced kid, and another idiot who apparently made his transactions transparently obvious and got caught. We only hear about the ones who get caught, and I highly doubt these guys are the only ones doing it. They're just the only ones dumb enough to make it so transparent.
If you send the email to another Hushmail user, it never leaves their servers. They themselves admit that the email is no longer secure if you send it to someone outside of Hushmail. Do you know how Hushmail works?
I happen to know that the data you type in to your email does not just magically jump through the air through TCP/IP by Magic Fairy, and therefore the data itself, as well as the face you were connected to hushmail, is obvious to anyone sniffing traffic. What's the security? https? Yeah right.
If you want to get really fancy, have a form on your website both for notifications and counternotifications and automate the process. If click-wraps work, then that might too! IANAL.
According to Amway, P&G was funding Schwartz's site, which Schwartz denies. Due to the legal battle, Schwartz finally took his site down, although it is still mirrored heavily around the world. Despite the fact that Amway and their lawyers were never able to answer Schwartz's challenge to point out even one single incorrect statement on his site, he was effectively silenced by Amway's continued litigation. They didn't need to win in court.
Scamway is a litigious cult on the level of $cientology. Like all scams, they can't survive when the truth about their scam is freely available. However, they know that it's very easy for a large corporation to outspend a single individual and litigate them to utter financial destruction regardless of the merits of the case.
Welcome to Amerika. How much freedom can you afford?
2600 themselves had the DeCSS code on their site, so they were responsible. I am an ISP. If one of my users posts the DeCSS code on their home page, I am not responsible nor liable. A Cease and Desist letter from MPAA would not be cause of concern to me. But it would be of concern to the user.
This is dangerous ignorance.
Tell it to Netcom.
IANAL, but my opinion is to let anything go, make your posters know that they should not post copyright materials, and when a copyright holder gets in touch with you about a posting, and can prove that they hold the rights, and they request that it be removed, then comply.
They don't have to prove they hold the rights, just submit a sworn statement under penalty of perjury that they do. At least if you're trying to be within the safe harbor provisions of DMCA. You don't need to do this but it saves you lawsuits from thugs, lunatics and Scientologists (but I repeat myself.)
There are over 40+ computers and no way to tell who was using them. Bamo no one to blame and no one to trace.
Ever heard of fingerprints?
Further if you log into anything you intend to log into again from the same or a similar site, if it involves a sufficient level of illegality, all they have to do is wait for you to connect again, then swoop down on whichever one of the 40 terminals you're at.
This will work for some apps, but for real security it's a joke.
And this does NOT require you to police anything, only to act when given ACTUAL and CONSTRUCTIVE notice
Slight but important correction. Actual OR constructive notice, and possibly only actual notice.
You need to have a copyright page, and that page needs to have a DMCA agent, which can be you, if you have a clue and don't want to pay a designated legal agent by the hour to wade through kook mail. This should include your name, address for service of legal papers, telephone and/or fax number, email address, PGP key and any other means of contacting you.
The full details of this are available at Bitlaw and the statute is 17 USC 512.
(2)
Designated agent. The limitations on liability established in this subsection apply to a service provider only if the service provider has designated an agent to receive notifications of claimed infringement described in paragraph (3), by making available through its service, including on its website in a location accessible to the public, and by providing to the Copyright Office, substantially the following information:
(A)
the name, address, phone number, and electronic mail address of the agent.
(B)
other contact information which the Register of Copyrights may deem appropriate. The Register of Copyrights shall maintain a current directory of agents available to the public for inspection, including through the Internet, in both electronic and hard copy formats, and may require payment of a fee by service providers to cover the costs of maintaining the directory.
Now here's the bitch. Any complaint, no matter how ill-founded, must result in the removal of the disputed material, so long as it fully complies with the proper format for a DMCA notification, that is:
(3)
Elements of notification.
(A)
To be effective under this subsection, a notification of claimed infringement must be a written communication provided to the designated agent of a service provider that includes substantially the following:
(i)
A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
(ii)
Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site.
(iii)
Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity and that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to locate the material.
(iv)
Information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to contact the complaining party, such as an address, telephone number, and, if available, an electronic mail address at which the complaining party may be contacted.
(v)
A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
(vi)
A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
However, if the original poster of the material sends a counternotification, basically adhering to the same conventions, you can put the material right back up and then the complaining party has to sue the actual poster of the information or shut the fuck up.
Actually, they can conceivably just keep sending further complaints about the same material and forcing this tango to occur over and over again; it's not yet determined whether or not they can get away with it.
In *either* case, though, they can't sue *YOU*. At all. And this does NOT require you to police anything, only to act when given ACTUAL and CONSTRUCTIVE notice adhering to a specific format.
There is, by the way, no legal requirement that you actually have a DMCA Agent or comply with cease-and-desist orders you think are BS. The only problem with this is that you can then actually be sued and forced to defend yourself. DMCA also does not negate any legal defenses such as "Fair Use" that may exist under prior law, whether or not you choose to have an agent. It just immunizes you as a service provider from the inevitable kook suits that occur when you give free rein to Joe Nutbag to post to your website anonymously or otherwise.
If someone creates content (i.e. music), they have the right to put whatever restrictions they like, through the use of copyright and license agreements.
No it doesn't.
Excessive or illegal restrictions on the licensing of intellectual property can and has been construed as "copyright misuse" and has caused the IP owner to lose copyright infringement actions.
See this article for information on the Lasercomb case and others in which this has occurred. Specifically, licensing agreements forbidding reverse engineering are covered by this.
This is why the Microsoft EULA says this:
Limitations on Reverse Engineering, Decompilation, and Disassembly. You may not reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the SOFTWARE PRODUCT, except and only to the extent that such activity is expressly permitted by applicable law notwithstanding this limitation.
Bolds mine. It wouldn't have that added disclaimer if it would be illegal for them to forbid it outright, since they'd love to do that.
These recording moguls have already admitted and settled out of court for hundreds of millions they bilked the American consumer out of with illegal price-fixing schemes. If IP laws (which are nearly fictional in their moral authority) are to be obeyed then so are trade laws. Of course if you can afford enough lawyers you can afford to ignore the law and just cough up a nice hefty bribe to buy a few senators and change the laws.
This lawsuit is not about criminality, but about who gets a nicer slice of the swag. Eventually like mp3.com the RIAA will force Napster into a settlement, because they're the older and more well-established pack of thieves.
As for RIAA, fuck them. These bastards have pushed for decades to create new copyright legislation that extends copyrights nearly indefinitely, which amounts to wholesale theft from the public domain. Essentially, if they get their way, there WILL be no public domain. I consider it total war and basically anything goes. Hell with them.
They'd gladly wipe out freedom of speech or any chance of privacy in order to achieve their goals which they cloak in the flowery rhetoric of "responsibility" and "property" but which really means total control, forever, of everything "intellectual."
If given the choice between one word of free speech and all the intellectual property in the world, my choice is burn it all, fuck it, we don't need it.
i assert that the licensing model is NOT appropriate, i suppose i should have been more clear on that in my original post. it makes no sense in general that if something, say an album that takes a few days for a recording group to create (and really, they can bust em out that fast), has work put into it one time, it seems logical that the producers/artists should receive appropriate payment one time.
That's bogus because it is hardly ever that someone knows an "appropriate payment" at the moment the work is created. Britney Spears albums make millions of bucks when really the "appropriate payment" for these crimes against art would be a horsewhipping, whereas the author of Moby Dick doesn't get diddly because he's dead by the time anyone noticed his work is worth anything.
I suppose you could have some sort of Communist model of intellectual property where a group of apparatchiks decide what is important art and what is an appropriate payment, but the current system, as stupid as it is, is probably preferable to that.