Johan Wevers wasn't the only resident of the Netherlands to become involved in the controversy over NOTs. A newcomer to the Internet controversy named Jetta Eggers (jeta@xs4all.nl) posted the text of NOTs 34 to alt.religion.scientology on October 1. On October 2, she received an email notice from Helena Kobrin. And on October 10, she posted the text of the judgement against Arnie Lerma to the newsgroup, thereby prompting another email notice from Helena Kobrin.
Things heated up for Jetta on October 28, when she placed the text of NOTs 22 and NOTs 34 on her Web page at http://www.xs4all.nl/~jeta/. This apparently included a translation into Dutch, along with commentary. Scientology contacted XS4ALL about the page, threatening a lawsuit. But Jetta apparently refused to take down her page, as she stated her intent to start a public discussion and a judicial investigation of the medical activities of Scientology in the Netherlands.
Jetta received a written letter delivered via courier on November 11, again requesting that she remove the NOTs documents from her Web page. A second letter was sent to her on November 22. Jetta is covering her unfolding story on her Web page, where you read the latest happenings.
Some users of the Internet must have believed that the act violating copyright law was worth it, because Scientology's representatives had to scramble far and wide to prevent NOTs from spreading further and further across the globe. Yet another posting of NOTs to alt.religion.scientology came on Saturday, October 19. This posting apparently came from Austria. It was encoded with a binary-encryption process called MIME (which is not as easy to decode as the more popular uuencode form of binary posting, but not difficult). Someone posted a forged cancel message to delete this post from an account in Los Angeles only a few hours later. No regular participants on alt.religion.scientology were affiliated with the University at the time, and it is currently not known who posted NOTs from there.
Another posting of NOTs was made on October 28. This time the documents were encoded in uuencode form. The posting was cancelled once again, and the cancels came from the same account that had forged the cancels of the previous NOTs posting. The choice of the anonymous remailer may have been meant as a joke, because the word "squirrel" is an insult in Scientology lingo. It refers to someone who practices Scientology independently, without any control from the "official" organization of Scientology.
In addition to the cancel messages, several World Wide Web sites that allow their users to access Usenet received email from Scientology representatives, requesting that the NOTs documents be removed from their servers. Here is one such email, sent to the Super Zippo news server.
Only a couple of days after Andreas Heldal-Lund made NOTs available on his Web page, Denmark resident Jesper Toftegaard (toffer@post3.tele.dk) did the same thing by putting the text of NOTs on his Web page. The address of his Web page is http://home3.inet.tele.dk/toffer/. Of course, Helena Kobrin contacted him and he took the documents down; however, apparently she had trouble keeping in touch with him. On November 23, Jesper posted a notice saying that NOTS was available again on his home page.
Jesper has received two letters and a visit from a representative of Scientology. His story is still unfolding at this time, and he is keeping a diary of events on his Web page. He posted a sample of this correspondence to alt.religion.scientology on December 9, in which Helena Kobrin apparently repeated her demand that he no longer no longer make copyrighted materials available on request.
GeoCities is a World Wide Web service offering free home pages to users. Someone took advantage of this to place NOTs on a Web page there at http://www.geocities.com/HotSprings/3503/. It was no surprise to learn that one day later, on November 13, GeoCities had removed the page at the request of Scientology.
A user in Germany had evidently taken an interest in the NOTs documents -- enough of an interest to put them on his Web page. The newsgroup alt.religion.scientology first learned of this when a message was posted on November 19, informing the newsgroup that Helena Kobrin had warned an Internet service company in Germany of the NOTs page and its possible copyright violations. There hasn't been any word yet as to whether the page has been taken down, but it seems more than likely. The address of Stephan Kleinert's Scientology page is http://www.inka.de/~gromit/sciento.html.
On November 20, someone using the address of rruss@queernet.org posted the text of NOTs to alt.religion.scientology. The message headers contained the titles "OT1" through "OT7," but they were not the OT levels -- they were NOTs. Once again, these messages were immediately cancelled, thus verifying that they were indeed the genuine NOTs documents.
In addition to the cancels for the NOTs posting, this time an additional message from Martin Hunt was cancelled. (Mr. Hunt is another regular participant on alt.religion.scientology.) It turned out that Mr. Hunt's message was unrelated to NOTs, though Scientology still considered it to be a copyright violation. Here is a copy of Helena Kobrin's message to Martin, and here is his reply.
Per Lundquist (t95perlu@und.ida.liu.se), a student in Sweden, put the text of NOTs on his home page at http://130.236.236.30/CoS/index.html . On November 28, the University of Linköping became the latest recipient of phone calls and faxes from Scientology. Although they sympathized with Mr. Lundquist and his actions, they did not want the university to become embroiled in a legal battle. The offending documents were removed from Mr. Lundquist's web pages. He describes what happened in this message to alt.religion.scientology and this message.
However, on December 4 Mr. Lundquist posted a message saying that NOTs had been on his page for one week. The details surrounding this incident are still uncertain, as he claims to have one page of "censored" material and another page of "uncensored" materials. This apparently attracted the attention of Scientology, as Mr. Lundquist received an alleged email from Helena Kobrin on December 9.
By December 13, the NOTs documents had been available on the Web for two weeks from the University of Linköping. Apparently the University's hands were tied and they could not do anything legally to stop Mr. Lundquist at this point: he did not have the NOTs documents on a Web page, and they apparently did not have the right to examine his private email without a legal order.
The NOTs distribution reached three weeks on December 20.
Once again, the reader is reminded that the NOTs materials are copyrighted by Scientology, and the act of downloading NOTs may be a violation of copyright law.
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