I like the way you guys think. :)

Good time to land an EFF gig.

Us lawyers have a saying: bad cases make bad law. Or maybe it's bad facts make bad cases. I was pretty 420'd during law school, tell you the truth. But I do remember the part about the Constitutional right to free religious practice. Maybe it takes an atheist to notice this, but Scientology is unquestionably a religion and has the right to own, disseminate - and withhold from public view as they deem necessary - sacramental and scriptural materials. Perhaps the situation is not unlike the withholding of Dead Sea Scroll content and imagery, based on copyright law but motivated by religious concerns. Sadly, by provoking a Church which incorporates confronatation and litigation into its theology, the combatants in these cases make the ways of mischief obvious to corporate rights-holders and thus un-thinkingly pave the way for much more heinous misdeeds (with plenty yet to come, be sure of that) by the Disneys and Segas and Playboys and Adobes of this world.

Edited by author 03-21-2002 02:15 PM
I think your Blizzard comment is a bit off point. Blizzard created the Battle.Net platform as a free place to play their products online. In order to use this service, you need to purchace the game, not rip it off, and input a CD code. The open source version had no cd key checking function, meaning that just about anyone could rip off a game and then play online.

It's their product, they weren't comfortable with someone making a carbon copy of their product, sans piracy protection, so they shut them down. What's wrong with that?

If you don't go after people infringing on your copyright, you lose it.

Stoner, first, thank you for so succinctly phrasing Scientology's chief problems -- its incorporation of confrontation and litigation into its theology.

Second, Scientology's right to copyright doesn't extend to suppressing all dissent, which is what those suppressed links contain. Surely you don't mean to say that dissent automatically "provokes" Scientology. That dissent is religious practice as well.

If nothing else, the First Amendment is higher up on the legal food chain than the DMCA. I hope I hope I hope.

The great scam of scientology is that people don't even question their notion that it's a religion.

The highest teachings of this church were made public domain in Sweden, where you can see for yourself how utterly preposterous the whole thing is.

Anyway. God bless Cory for highlighting this, and linking to xenu.net - a superb, objective, and above all else nescessary website. I live around the corner from one of their 'churches' (for a church, it doesn't half look like a shop). Xenu.net has been the cornerstone of the local anti-scientologist movement, and I hate to think that the lawyers^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpriests at whacko HQ have started to pull the rug out from under it.

Scientology would be hilarious, if they didn't kill, destroy lives, and lie and cheat.

> It's their product, they weren't comfortable with someone making
> a carbon copy of their product, sans piracy protection, so they
> shut them down. What's wrong with that?

There is no mandate to replicate other peoples' protection measures in your own reverse-engineered versions of technologies. If people are cloning Vivdendi's CD, then Vivendi should go after the cloners, *not* the people who are making improved versions of the server that are better and have more features.

If, for example, Apple produces an innovative, valuable digital music player, they have no obligation to include technical countermeasures that stop people from using that device to make unauthorized copying impossible.
The Betamax decision affirmed the principle in law that a tool that is capable of substantial non-infringing uses is legal, even if there are infringing uses for that tool.

The bnetd server does lots of good, noninfringing things, and nothing about it *demands* infringement. The bnetd people are not breaking any laws. If some *users* are breaking the law, well, let Vivendi pursue those users.
Here's another example: I bought and paid for American McGee's Alice. The game requires that the CD be in the drive in order to run. This is a giant pain in the ass for me, since I use my drive for lots of other things, and don't want to have to travel with a spare CD case to put my $70 Alice CD in.
So I ripped the CD to a .dmg file (like an ISO) using Apple's DiskCopy tool, and now I mount it on my desktop when I want to play the game, fooling the program into thinking that the CD is in the drive.

This is a fair use. I bought it, I own it. It could also be used to pirate the game, since the ripped image of the disk can be used to allow others who get a copy of it from me to play the game without buying the CD. Until I give someone a copy of that file, though, no laws are being broken (and arguably, even if I do give someone a copy, we're still not breaking the law unless we both use it to play at the same time -- otherwise, it could be considered a loan [permitted under the Doctrine of First Sale] or a backup).
Even if I do start to bulk-burn and distribute copies of that image, it's *me* who's breaking the law, not Apple (who made DiskCopy).

Suing tool-makers has a chilling effect on innovation. Should Evan put some kind of copyright-checking scheme (say, a list of banned files that can't be linked to) into Blogger to make sure that no one uses his tool to post infringing materials? If he thought he had to, would Blogger continue to exist?

> If you don't defend people infringing on your copyright, you
> lose it.

This is not true.

If you enter "xenu.net" (with the quotes) you get a ton of links on Google. If you enter xenu.net (no quotes) you don't get any links, but you do get an option to search "xenu.net" by clicking a link. In other words, Google still has plenty of links to xenu.net.

while xenu.net may be available to google. If you type in Scientology you do not get any page countering Scientology.

last week from the blogs and the like xenu.net was heavily crosslinked. Effectivly the thing that needs to happen is a google bomb to a page that links to clambake and xenu.net
but the page itself has to be clean of anything that might be sueable.

Well, Boing Boing has lots of Googlejuice. Maybe we will start to show up in the Google rankings on Scientology.