At 10:02 PM 5/15/96 -0800, jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com> wrote: [snip]

The copyright issue is probably irrelevant to the Scientology dispute, anyway. The material on which the copyright is claimed almost certainly wasn't marked, appropriately, as it would have had to be for the copyright to be valid. While current law no longer requires the "circle-C" notation long used for this purpose, the material involved is far more than old enough to have been subject to this requirement, and once a copyright is lost (or not claimed) I believe it couldn't be regained.

I think you're wrong about that. You're confusing copyrights and trademarks, I believe. It's a trademark that you lose by not asserting it or defending it. Someone please correct me if I have this wrong :) There have been claims that the copyrights were not transferred properly from Hubbard to RTC, but they have yet to be proven in court. CoS won against Arnie Lerma in a summary judgement. Copyrights were definitely the issue in that decision.

The threat to remailers is one of the many reasons the Leahy bill sucked, and that would have made it worse by imposing criminal sanctions on this kind of thing. Ironically, with the way remailers are used, it would actually have been possible for some copyright holder to fabricate a violation of copyright law by posting his own material through remailers, and then sue the final remailer, or have its owner prosecuted.

The ugly provision in the Leahy bill had to do with obstruction of criminal investigations, didn't it? The CoS copyright cases have all been civil. I don't see how it applies.

I'm glad the people around here finally saw the light.

That part of the bill stunk, I agree... Rich ______________________________________________________________________ Rich Burroughs richieb@teleport.com http://www.teleport.com/~richieb See my Blue Ribbon Page at http://www.teleport.com/~richieb/blueribbon New EF zine "cause for alarm" - http://www.teleport.com/~richieb/cause