Since some of the materials which describe the $cientology cult could be
considered to be copywritten materials, I have censored myself and The
Skeptic Tank by deleting any and all possible text files which describes
the cult's hidden mythologies. I have elected to quote just a bit of the
questionable text according to the "Fair Use" legal findings afforded to
those who report. - Fredric L. Rice, The Skeptic Tank, 09/Sep/95
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From: Zane Thomas <zthomas@igc.apc.org>
Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology
Subject: Re: HELENA SPEAKS, AGAIN
Message-ID: <APC&1'0'66608042'a94@igc.apc.org>
References: <APC&1'0'66608041'956@igc.apc.org>
Date: Fri, 07 Jul 1995 12:42:20 -0700 (PDT)
X-Gateway: notes@igc.apc.org
Lines: 55
Lenny,
|Zane Thomas (zthomas@igc.apc.org) wrote:
|
|: ...
|:
|: 9. Regarding the two parts of SCAMIZDAT that the culties don't claim
|: as their own she says that "Posting these documents in such a way
|: as to suggest they are legitimate Scientology documents is
|: actionable under section 43(a) of the federal Lanham Act."
|:
|: What the heck is that?
|
|The concept she's talking about is the "attribution" side of the copyright
|law -- just as one cannot claim authorship of somebody else's work, one
|cannot sully another author's reputation by claiming that he wrote something
|that he did _not_.
Ok, makes sense.
But if I posted them and said that although the cult doesn't claim
ownership of the material it cure looks like El Tubbard's droppings to
me, then I'd probably be ok. Right?
I notice that Helena has repeatedly said that the documents in question
are "forgeries." This must mean that they are similar in some way to
actual cult documents. I suppose that the similarity could be as
little as the title, but who knows? It could be that they are
paraphrased versions of the real thing.
Some have claimed and/or speculated that the documents are actually the
cult's official rantings and that they are being "disowned" because of
the laughability of what they contain. I'm having a little trouble
accepting this idea since applying the "laughability index" to El
Tubbard's droppings would require them to disown just about everything
he's ever written. I realize that calling Jesus a pervert is pretty
damning and if El Tubbard actually said that, or something substantially
similar to it, it would put a little egg on the cult's face. However,
I fail to see that they have any appreciation for how foolish they
already look. Again I'm forced to conclude that Helena is probably not
lying when she says that the docs are "forgeries", but I am left
wondering how "good" the forgeries are.
Also, it seems that if the forgeries are reasonably accurate
"forgeries" of the originals, that the cult has failed to protect its
"trade secrets" <spit> inasmuch as it has failed to move to prevent
distribution of the forgeries. For instance, if I had the formula for
The Real Thing and simply rearranged the ingredients, changed some
names (like suger = cane-suger) and published it, then wouldn't it be
true that the formula was, essentially, no longer secret since by
following it anyone could make The Real Thing?
Zane