mendax.org

Hubbard’s famed church continues to complain about people linking to their copyrighted material online, including material that many people claim fits perfectly well under “fair use” policy. Nonetheless, Scientology’s most recent endeavor urged Google to remove links from the search engine’s database, presumably to quell public knowledge of the Church’s inner-ongoings.

The fact that linking to sites has come under fire is preposterous, IMO. I can see why sites housing copyrighted material may come under fire, but to link to those sites should not be criminal. The Internet’s whole purpose is to foster the spread of information, and by pointing people in the right direction, Google is helping to maintain that initiative. Of course, since Scientology can’t force foreign hosts to remove material under US laws, they naturally have to go after the next best thing.

The beauty of Scientology’s complaint is that it’s actually driving more hits to the links they were hoping to make disappear, now that Google is including the letters of complaint and posting links through an affiliate site for public consumption. This should increase awareness of Scientology’s practices, as well as curb initiative by other companies to prevent the spread of information.

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