Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology Path: netnews.worldnet.att.net!uunet!in3.uu.net!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!howland.erols.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.corpcomm.net!funny.bahnhof.se!seunet!news2.swip.net!news.wineasy.se!not-for-mail From: Zenon Panoussis Subject: Heavy artillery firing blank shells Message-ID: <32360911.5EF2@dodo.pp.se> Date: Wed, 11 Sep 1996 00:34:25 +0000 Reply-To: oracle@dodo.pp.se X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.0 (Macintosh; I; 68K) MIME-Version: 1.0 CC: oracle@dodo.pp.se Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lines: 180 Yesterday evening I chose to go out, at the cost of depriving ars of the latest news. Sorry. Monday: I had some long discussions with the bailiff's office. Their initially irregural handling of the case has turned into a strictly formal, 100% correct approach. It was reconfirmed that the scienos will under no circumstances be allowed to look at my disks. An independent computer technician was booked for Tuesday to begin searching my disks for the "offending material". A fax newsletter on legal matters reported the case. It has limited distruibution, but reaches many important people. Studying the injunction against me I realized that it leaves me quite some elbow room. The scienos stressed the court intentionally in order to get their injunction, which they otherwise probably wouldn't have gotten. But as everything, such things can backfire. The court has prohibited me to "further infringe upon RTC's copyright by spreading the material" instead of forbidding me "to spread the material". This means that all spreading that is within the limits of the normally permitted, such as quoting, making copies for my personal use and spreading copies to a limited private circle, is also permitted in this case. Consequently I reported to the court in writing that I, while under the injunction, made and spread copies of the material to such a limited private circle. The scienos may now motion for the fine to be charged, or abstain from such motion. Either way they loose, which seems to make them mad. I also learned that the scienos filed a new motion with the bailiff, demanding - a new search and seizure in order to take "the material" still or again in my possession and - that I should be called to be questioned under oath about the names of the people to which I gave "the material" before last Wednesday's search and that I, if I did not appear, would be fetched by the police. That all sounds very threatening, but it is very hollow. It is also very American, and lacks real grounds in Swedish law. Tuesday: I appealed against (part of) the preliminay injunction. This makes for the fourth process in the case. The primary court is handling the lawsuit. The bailiff is handling the execution of the injunction. Another section of the primary court is handling my appeal against the bailiff's execution. And now the court of appeals is handling my appeal against the injunction itself. It can make anyone dizzy. A small but interesting and factually correct article appeared in Expressen, one of the two major Swedish tabloids. Circulation about half a million or so. A journalist from a Norwegian paper made me late for my appointment with the bailiff. It was worth it. I haven't seen the article yet. I spent the whole day at the bailiff's, while a computer technician was going through my hard disks at a rate of appr $ 130 per hour (scieno cost). It proved that at some point I made a major mistake. The files that should not be and were not there, i e the OTs and NOTs were actualy there. This fact has no legal or practical consequences whatsoever, except that it makes me loose face, which I don't like. The lesson is that when dead tired I should go to bed instead of doing things that demand the presence of my brain. The files were copied to a diskette and wiped from my disk. Technician, bailiff and me agreed that there is no way on earth to determine with absolute certainty that the files to be taken in custody are not on my disks. They could be ZIPped, ARJed, RARed or PGPed, they could be compiled into a functional EXE or DLL, they could be steganographed into images or into empty disk space. A telephone conference between bailiff and RTC's lawyers resulted in an agreement that the RTC is satisfied if certain text strings are searched for and not found. The stings were "OT", "NOTS", "NED", "BT", "BODY THETAN", "VOLCANO", "GPM", "WARD" and "VORLON". It was given to the computer technician by McShame, thus avoiding possible problems of ethics for the lawyer. Needless to say, McShame forgot to mention that the last two search strings do not appear in the copyrighted material. The purpose of the search is to find the files, not information about my contacts. I protested. Finally I reached an agreement with the bailiff that the search for the strings would be done, but that the scienos will not know whether the strings are found or not; only whether the OTs and NOTs are found. At 3 pm I had the great honour of meeting McShame. He and one of the Swedish lawyers came to see the bailiff, not me. McShame kept a high but hollow profile and during the whole meeting he wouldn't meet my eye. The impression I got is that I maybe would buy a used car from him, but if I had a 8-year old daughter, I'd never leave her alone with him. But that's of course just my impression. I also learned that the scienos decided to make a penal case out of this, parallell to the civil case. I suppose that they will be demanding my arrest, pointing at the fact that I am a proven and admitted recidivist. I'm smiling. Meeting Leander, the Swedish lawyer, I took the opportunity to remind him of what I wrote to Kobrin not so long ago, namely that I would be prepared to discuss an end to my in extenso publications of CoS material, if the CoS would permit normal fair use quotes and end the spamming of ars. He will discuss it with his client. At 5 pm I had an appointment at the studio of the local Stockholm TV station. This story was the first and one of the main news. I was interviewed together with a representative of the national organization for the protection of copyright on the Internet. I said things as "Copyright is not intended to be used in this way. If a nazi party writes into its program that it intends to burn the jews, I am entitled to expose that, even if the party program is copyrighted. Well, this is similar". and "The scienos are trying to censor the net by attacking ISPs. Whenever there is a named and identifiable user behind published information, the ISPs should have no responsibility. Any other approach would kill the freedom of speech". There was no debate. The copyright protection representative agreed with me. Unverified rumors have it that the court staff is badly overworked copying the NOTs. As I have mentioned earlier, they are public documents, available on demand. Z --- oracle@everywhere: The ephemeral source of the eternal truth...