((My comments in double parentheses - Homer)) LETTER OF 8/29/94 TO SMALL, LARKIN AND KIDDE CD - 17 29 August 1994 Copyright (C) 1994 Homer Wilson Smith Redistribution rights granted for non commercial purposes. Thomas M. Small Homer W. Smith Small Larkin and Kidde PO 880 18th Floor 10940 Wilshire Boulevard Ithaca, NY 14851-0880 USA Los Angeles, Ca 90024-3945 1 607 277-0959 Voice tel (310) 209 4400 1 607 277-8913 Fax fax (310) 209 4450 homer@rahul.net 08/28/94 1:00pm Dear Mr. Thomas Small, We are in receipt of your letter dated 8/26/94 concerning copyright violations on the internet of the works of LRH. Please acknowledge receipt of this fax with a return fax. Although I am sending this to you by fax, hard copies will also be forwarded via registered mail, so that a record is kept of all our communications. You might consider doing the same. I believe that faxed communications will greatly speed up the resolution of the problem at hand. You should also know, that since your letters to me are copyrighted by you, I will be posting summaries and paraphrases of your letters to the public net, and I will be posting ALL of my correspondence with you to the net verbatim. A copy of the letter I posted to the net is appended below. I have read and understood your letter, and although I found it to be rather vague, I understand your concerns and I am more than willing to work with you within the letter of the law to accommodate your needs and those of your client. There are two points of concern here, one is the posting of copyrighted material to the net, and the other is archiving of postings that go to the net. As for my own postings to the net, I am not posting any copyrighted material and I have no intentions to post copyrighted material in the future, except for excerpts under the Fair Use Doctrine for the purposes of educational and critical commentary. I think your concerns in this regard with respect to me will be minimal. However I am the system administrator of one archive site for both alt.clearing.technology and alt.religion.scientology. This archive site contains a running transcript of postings that have been made to both groups. In truth, due to disk space limitations, the transcript archives only go back a few months. Also in truth, I only started archiving alt.religion.scientology about a month ago, so most transcripts prior to that time are either lost or not in my possession. As you know I have no control over the net or what gets posted there, I only have control over the recorded transcripts of what my archives catch automatically. The archiving is an automatic process and I do not select for or against any particular kind of posting. I can not stop others from posting copyrighted materials or even trade secret materials, and I can not stop people from posting things anonymously. The internet is not a tightly controlled computer system. It is a world wide web of MILLIONS of interconnected systems, that cover all of North and South America, all of Europe, Japan, Israel, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Australia, South Africa, even Russia and China. Some of these countries do not have the same copyright and trade secret laws that the US does, and of course there is no way to stop postings coming from these countries. Because postings move around the net very much the way mail does in real life, this makes it easy to post anonymously rendering it virtually impossible to trace determined posters. For example if I wanted to send an anonymous letter to the New York Times, I could first send it to a friend in England, who could then remail it to someone I don't even know in Russia, who could then remail it to a friend in Germany, who would finally send it to the Times. In this way, it would be very hard to trace the letter back to me. Anonymous mail on the internet works the same way. There are probably 30 automatic remailers worldwide on the internet that allow people to send anonymous e-mail to private individuals and anonymous postings to internet newsgroups. There are also 'back door' approaches to sending anonymous mail that any educated internet user can use, and which are virtually untraceable. Some of these remailers keep close tabs on who is sending mail to them. Others are not so careful. Thus by sending a posting to one of these remailers, and in fact making sure it goes through more than one remailer before it gets to where it is going, it becomes virtually impossible to trace. This is all the more true when the various remailers chosen are in different countries. By the time a posting has traveled through 4 different remailers in 4 different countries, it is almost impossible to trace where it came from. The people on the internet are not a particularly civilized group, especially where Scientology is concerned. In fact they could be more likened to an angry crowd. This crowd is not so much interested in the letter of the copyright law as they are in Justice. Right or wrong, they perceive the Church of Scientology as perpetrating an injustice on the people of Earth, a perception that seems to be growing every day on the internet. The atmosphere on the net concerning Scientology could be best described as ugly. However, I and the other members of the Free Zone Alliance are but a small voice of reason and restraint compared to the antagonism and hostility of thousands of disaffected and enraged Scientologists that are reading the net, most of whom blew from the Church with their LRH books and Tech and OEC volumes intact, and some of whom blew after doing the Upper Levels. Thus the potential for widespread violation of copyright and trade secrets is not insignificant, given the speed, reach and persistence of postings on the internet, and the embittered atmosphere of the crowd. This provides an on going problem to me, as I do not have the time or the resources to be constantly going through the archives to comb out forbidden data or copyrighted works. I don't even read the groups in question sometimes as I have a very busy schedule and the internet seems to live and go on without me. The archiving process runs unattended as does all news propagation through the internet. My own archives are in fact no different from the almost 10 million machines that archive and post news every day on the internet, except that my archives do not expire after 14 days, but after 3 or 4 months. Further as you know, anyone can record such transcripts for themselves, and repost the material later via anonymous remailers, just to get the data back onto the internet once again, and thus back into my own archives. Thus to some extent I am caught between a rock and a hard place. If I start taking data out, various people will merely repost the material, putting it back in 10 fold, as they have done with the now infamous Elaine Siegel letter. I don't know how many copies of that letter are in the transcripts. People just keep reposting it. The more people object to a posting, the more people post it. By 'cleaning' the archives, or ceasing to archive altogether, people may perceive that I have sold out to suppression of freedom of speech on the internet rather than merely trying to uphold the true and valid copyrights of your clients. This of course would lead to other's starting their own archives and making them available to the internet in a hidden and covert fashion that would not be as easy to trace and keep tabs on as my archives are. It could also lead to interest on the part of the media concerning the internet and INTERNATIONAL freedom of speech issues, which could lead to a major flap for the Church of Scientology. Internet users are able to send e-mail to over a hundred major media sources with the single push of a return key. Thus it behooves us to proceed judiciously and with caution lest we exacerbate the very condition we are trying to handle. It has been my experience, that although there are times that some people post copyrighted material to the net, usually this passes as a phase. I do not believe that copyright violations are an ongoing problem, although it could be turned into one, with rash and heavy handed action. For all this though, I am willing to cooperate with you as best I can, as I do believe in copyright protection within the letter of the law. To show my good faith in this matter, as of 8/29 I have temporarily suspended ALL access to the archives, although automatic archiving is still in progress. For obvious reasons this denial of access can not last long, so a swift resolution to this matter is in order. Please feel free to communicate to me your ideas and possible solutions to the problems that you perceive on the internet. I suggest that we communicate by fax, forwarding hard copies by registered mail as backup. Homer Wilson Smith United Free Zone Alliance