From news-central.tiac.net!news-in.tiac.net!uunet!in1.uu.net!207.172.3.52!feed1.news.erols.com!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!solace!mn6.swip.net!mn5.swip.net!news Wed Mar 5 22:32:04 1997 Path: news-central.tiac.net!news-in.tiac.net!uunet!in1.uu.net!207.172.3.52!feed1.news.erols.com!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!solace!mn6.swip.net!mn5.swip.net!news From: Zenon Panoussis Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology Subject: A day in court Date: Wed, 05 Mar 1997 15:02:24 +0100 Organization: - Lines: 107 Message-ID: <331D7CF0.7F90@dodo.pp.se> NNTP-Posting-Host: dialup68-3-7.swipnet.se Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit NNTP-Posting-User: s-40153 X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01 (Win95; I) CC: Madame Kobrin , The Twit Just back home from today's hearing, and here's the account. The RTC was represented by two lawyers (anything less would not be impressive enough), I was there with my lawyer and there was a little audience. At the entrance hall there was a scientologist today, just like every other day, reading the NOTs. Remarkably, todays scieno was actually reading the NOTs text, which raised a suspicion that he was not a scieno at all after all, but hired help. Real scienos have always stuck to the rule that they are not allowed to read, so they have spent their hours fingering the cover or reading magazines while "guarding" the public NOTs. The judge on this case, Rolf Nöteberg, is known for being hard on the lawyers. I have never had a case with him before, but I really enjoyed today's hearing. What distinguishes Nöteberg from the average judge is that he demands a high degree of stringency and keeps the proceedings on a very strictly legal level: no bullshit allowed. The CoS' lawyers on the other hand, all of them, are really good in blown up argumentation, efffect- seeking speeches and empty rhetorics in general, but are more than weak on the strictly legal level. They are used to creating effects, rather than making, supporting and proving legal points. They actually act in court in just the way scientologists act in general: they use "acceptable truths", they twist arguments, they try to attack rather than defend etc. With Nöteberg they had their day. He demanded exactness; he asked for precise references to law; he wanted to know how statements connected to the concrete motions; he demanded unbroken logical chains between allegations of facts and legal allegations. At one point I felt so sorry for Dahlborn, today's scientology star, that I had a hard time to stop myself from helping him. And, nota bene, Nöteberg was in no way partial to me, not the slightest. Those of you that understand Scandinavian, and especially those of you that are judges, lawyers or otherwise work in law, should really listen to the recording of the hearing. Well, to the substance: the RTC made its points rather half-hartedly and in a way confirmed my assumptions that they are counting on losing. They presented at this point no evidence. Points 1 and 2 in my previous posting presented the RTC with the difficulty of specifying just what material they have copyright to. The masked NOTs are masked, so how is it to be proved that what I handed in to the court in September corresponds to the their copyrighted work? There exist after all at least another 700 pages of filed material called "OTs" and "NOTs" over and above the 223 pages filing that is held against me, and the RTC has not even claimed copyright to all of this material. Dahlborn had no solutions to suggest and - unfortunately for him - the RTC has the burden of proof. Point 3 in my previous posting, my handing out of OTs and NOTs to a number of friends, presented the RTC with unexpected difficulties. They had to claim that it was a copyright infringement, or else the whole point would fall. But copyright law forbids the distribution of a copyrighted work to the public; not its distribution within the private sphere. Pressed on this, Dahlborn decided to reform copyright law. He claimed that an unpublished work may not even be distributed within the private sphere. In other words, the RTC now claims that if you receive a letter, which strictly speaking is an unpublished copyrighted literary work, you may not show it to your wife or husband without commiting copyright infringement. Well, I wish the RTC good luck. Apart from the few clarifications of my and RTC's respective positions, not much mure was said. I wrote earlier that this preliminary hearing could pass on to a final hearing, but I was wrong. A separate final hearing is mandatory in this type of case. If it wasn't we could have closed the case today, but as it is, we have to have another hearing. This will be on April 24th and a ruling should come at the latest two weeks later. If the RTC doesn't withdraw from the case all together of course, which is a possibility that cannot be excluded. Kobra, how about it? Won't you rather pay my legal costs and withdraw, rather than have it written on your face that you lost? The hearing will be available in RealAudio at http://www.wineasy.se/weesp/trial.htm in a few hours. Z --- oracle@everywhere: The ephemeral source of the eternal truth...