At the beginning of April 1997, a startling piece of evidence was revealed in the case of Religious Technology Center vs. Grady Ward, suggesting that the copyrights to the NOTs documents may not have belonged to RTC at all... rather, they belonged to the Church of Scientology of California, an organization that had declared bankruptcy as a result of Larry Wollersheim's $2.5 million judgement (which he still had not collected by this time). More details of this case can be found on my History of NOTs page.
The argument seemed to be that only one entity can hold the rights to a work at a time. If CSC did own NOTs, then RTC did not. But if NOTs did not actually belong to Religious Technology Center, then one might logically assume that RTC had absolutely no legal basis to sue anyone over the posting of NOTs to the Internet. Correct?
David Gerard, a resident of Australia, minister of the Church of the SubGenius, and veteran participant on alt.religion.scientology, believed this was so. He set out to test his theory on April 7, 1997, when he posted a message to alt.religion.scientology announcing his intention to post the NOTs materials. The next day, April 8, he did just that: he posted one of the NOTs files available from Andreas Heldal-Lund's Operation Clambake Web site.
A flurry of activity ensued...but this time, something unusual happened. In all of the previous instances of NOTs postings to alt.religion.scientology, the persons in question had immediately been contacted via email by Helena Kobrin of RTC, as well as by phone and in person...but this did not happen to David. The NOTs posting was immediately cancelled, which showed that someone had been paying attention to David's posting, but he did not receive any personal email from any representatives of Scientology.
But someone at Scientology did take notice. On April 10, David announced that his Internet service provider had been contacted by a representative of Scientology, at which point he informed his ISP of the situation. But still he had not received any personal contact at all. This was a puzzling turn of events...especially when Helena Kobrin sent an email warning to the Tertius Internet provider.
As for the cancels, David received responses to his inquiry suggesting that there was no way to track down the cancel forger.
On April 21, David announced that his Internet account had been locked, though his Web page was still accessible. He apparently did receive a lawyer's letter in the mail, but the details of this have not been revealed yet.
David Gerard is hosting his own Web page describing the events surrounding his posting of NOTs at http://suburbia.net/~fun/scn/pers/fun/nots/.
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