Long awaited news (?) Page 1 ======== Path: earth.superlink.net!uunet!news-in2.uu.net!news00.sunet.se!sunic!mn6.swip.net!mn5.swip .net!news From: Zenon Panoussis Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology Subject: Long awaited news (?) Date: Fri, 27 Sep 1996 21:48:50 +0200 Organization: - Lines: 101 Message-ID: <324C2FA2.4AD@dodo.pp.se> Reply-To: oracle@dodo.pp.se NNTP-Posting-Host: dialup113-5-2.swipnet.se Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit NNTP-Posting-User: s-40153 X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0Gold (Win16; I) CC: dm@dma.se, hkk@netcom.com, oracle@dodo.pp.se It's a hard balance to keep ars informed without ruining the process that the information is about. I've therefore been sitting on the news during the whole past week. Now that they're ripe, here they go. As you remember, the court of appeals sealed the OTs and NOTs on September 16th. As that general decision didn't affect me as a party to the case, I couldn't appeal against it. So I left it where it was. On September 20th I handed in a letter in one copy to the office of the parliament, addressed personally to every member of the parliament (they're 349). The letter gave a short introduction to the CoS' practices and contained a legal copy of the OTs and NOTs, obtained from the primary court before the court of appeals' secrecy decision. Furthermore this letter contained a request to the MPs that they use their parliamentary immunity in order to republish the material. The instant the "filed" stamp touched this letter, an anonymous member of the general public requested a copy. His request was granted. From Monday the 23d the office of the parliament received a great number of similar requests, mainly from newspapers that in mysterious ways had heard about this highly interesting letter. All such requests were honoured until Wednesday, when the staff of the parliament realized that they were copying copyrighted material and stopped copying. From Wednesday on, anybody was allowed to read the stuff and take notes from it, but no more copies were handed out, except to MPs. Copyright infringment can be commited in one of two ways: by reproduction or by distribution of the protected material. The funny thing here is that the distribution of official documents, such as the infamous file attachment 37, is explicitly permitted by the constitution, and no copying has been performed by me. The copying that was done by the court and by the parliament (the latter not only to the public, but also to the MPs) was in turn done according to mandatory provisions of the constitution, which override copyright. The parliament staff's decision to stop copying was thus wrong, but had the beneficiary effect that it can no longer be established Long awaited news (?) Page 2 just how many people have had access to the document, given that they don't charge and don't hand out receipts for the mere reading. So when I heard about the little mistake, I didn't put them right. In consequence, if ever the CoS could claim that the OTs and NOTs have not been made public, which in my opinion they could not, that song has been sung to its end by now. As opposed to "published" in Swedish legal terminology, "made public" means just "reached the eyes of anyone outside the immediate circle of family and/or publishers of the author". Numerous legal copies circulate, whose owners are legally entitled to both possess them and recirculate them. That was one thing. Another thing was my appeal against the primary court's decision that my hard disks etc be taken into custody. I did get back my hard drives weeks ago, but there were still some Syquest disks and a pile of diskettes waiting at the bailiff's to be searched for "The Material". In my appeal I pointed at my constitutional right to possess ANY information, including pirate copies of copyrighted information for personal use, and motioned for the overturning of the original decision. In practice and effect the court of appeals went my way, though in the formal wording it only went half way. The court rephrased the original decision so that it is explicitly limited to cover not all material to which the RTC claims copyright, but only such material that constitutes copyright infringment. In plain English this means that editions, copies that are obviously intended for distribution, will remain in custody, while material that is intended for my personal use is to be returned to me. The effect: no person in this country can be prohibited from *possesing* the OTs and NOTs and the RTC has no grounds for a demand that files and books intended for personal use be destroyed or handed over, no matter where such files or books originally came from. On Monday I will be meeting with the bailiff to get my Syquests back unsearched, on the ground that they are obviously not intended for distribution. Mr Magnusson, the RTC lackey, will be there to put up a last fight for those disks. It will be a pleasure to meet him. Somebody said today that this will teach Madame Kobrin not to engage lightly in litigation in foreign countries with strange constitutions. Personally I don't think that this will teach any CoS member or associate anything. Their body thetans are programmed to lead them in one single way, and they will continue to go that way until they destroy themselves (amen). I can't help wondering now if the damage (to the CoS; to society it's a blessing) from my Fishman pages wouldn't have been much lesser than the damage resulting from the Kobrin efforts to shut me up. Z --- oracle@everywhere: The ephemeral source of the eternal truth...