Copyright — or wrong?
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Susan Mullaney is not a fan of the Church of Scientology. A longtime poster to the Usenet newsgroup alt.religion.scientology, she spends much of her energy online exposing what she feels are the Church of Scientology’s repressive activities. Her two-year-old Web site contains a library of short audio excerpts from L. Ron Hubbard speeches and a “secret” Scientology questionnaire, as well as her biting commentary about this material — the usage of which she claims falls well within legal “fair use” boundaries. In March, Mullaney was informed by her Internet service provider, Frontier GlobalCenter, that her Web site had been partially blocked, due to a letter from the Church of Scientology that alleged she was illegally using copyrighted materials. Thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which the Church of Scientology invoked in this case, Frontier was required to block the Web site unless Mullaney agreed to contest the charges in court. She did agree and filed the paperwork, but still it took four months for Mullaney to have her Web site reinstated. Susan’s tussle with the Church of Scientology is, in many ways, an old story. In a war against what it calls the “cult of Scientology,” the online community of Scientology critics has long copied, distributed and annotated hundreds of “top secret” and copyrighted documents from the Church of Scientology — usually invoking fair use laws, (which allow publishers to excerpt copyrighted material for the purpose of comment or criticism), to defend their actions. The Church of Scientology has determinedly fought to dismantle the Web sites that have republished its material all across the Net — using legal threats, filtering software and innumerable pro-Scientology posts in Usenet groups. It’s one of the best-documented battles on the Net, but there is a new weapon in these skirmishes, courtesy of the U.S. government: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, signed into law in November 1998, is the first U.S. legislation to address online copyright protection. Written in compliance with the global copyright protection treaty from the World Intellectual Property Organization, the act prohibits the unlawful use of any kind of copyrighted file online. Until this legislation, online copyright laws were vague at best, but thanks to this law, Internet service providers are now required to remove Web sites that allegedly break copyright laws — even before the copyright infringement has been proven More : salon.com |