NOTs in Australia

Q. Give an example of a 'copyright criminal'.
A. An organisation that spends six years selling (at six hundred dollars per hour), and suing and harassing people over, something it doesn't own and never did.

• You can now order the NOTs from the Swedish Parliament, paying standard copying fees and postage. Instructions on ordering are here or here. We also have how Chris Owen ordered his copy.

• What to do when a pressure group calls - written by Katherine Phelps of GlassWings for Electronic Frontiers Australia after the NOTs fuss.
  • Local text copy.

• EFA has a page on censorship issues in general.

• A mention of me on Modemac's NOTs page.

• The Western Australian Internet Association notes the issue in their April 1997 minutes (item 8).

I'll write this index page in more detail one day. Here are some documents that will help tell the story.

• Australia: harassment over NOTs postings - an a.r.s posting from me, made Thursday 10th April 1997.
• Australia: harassment over NOTs postings - an a.r.s posting from me, made Friday 11th April 1997.
• Australia: NOTs troubles - an a.r.s posting from me, made Saturday 12th April 1997.
• The Flag NOTs pack - on the Norwegian server where it has been since late 1996.
• The court decision that CSC (a corporate shell the CoS bankrupted to avoid paying Lawrence Wollersheim the five million dollar judgment he won against them) owns the NOTs, not RTC.
• William Barwell summarises the legal bind the CoS's publications-licensing arm, RTC, is in.
• The header I used to post the NOTs, which went like this:

  Now that we have established that RTC does NOT own NOTs, here we have some.

  I'll post one of the NOTs packs from the Operation Clambake page each day.

  These works are copyright the Church of Scientology of California, which CANNOT launch legal action - as a bankrupt shell - without paying the CSC's creditor and likely owner, Larry Wollersheim.

  Religious Technology Corporation has no standing to sue for these works, and certainly not to make any form of legal threat to me or anyone I know.

• A letter from AUSNet Services (world.net) to myself and Proff (the administrator of suburbia.net, whose feed comes from them) concerning my postings and the harassment they've been receiving from the CoS - even though not one byte of the postings touched a world.net machine. Harassment to try to get this Web page pulled. Also, my reply, sent to AUSNet and Proff.
• The Rev Mark Hanna, local OSA dude, as described to me by Tony McClelland:

  You have been in the presence of Mark Hanna. He was the guy in dark sunnies at the Sydney demonstration who introduced the guy who made the death threat to me. Mark also told me that "these" guys will finish you (Tony). I took out a restraining order against the first person but the magistrate would not issue me with one against Mark. He is a nasty bit of work.

  Mark also went to Tamworth in January 1995 (after the release of Lachlan from the Introspection Rundown incarceration at Gosford), under the assumed name "Neil Silk" posing as a journalist writing a story about my 28 years in the computer industry. He visited relatives and friends asking questions about me.

• Unauthorized use of copyrighted material - a 'Ho-note to the wrong tertius.net.au admin. It's the standard 'Ho-note boilerplate, but with an additional paragraph asserting that no, really, he doesn't know what he's on about, really ... they're ours, really they are ...
• Letter from Davies Ryan De Boos, Intellectual Property Lawyers. It's basically a 'Ho-note with a few extra paragraphs and a ridiculously overreaching 'agreement' they want me to sign.
• A second letter from Davies Ryan De Boos, by email, with my reply. This indicates 'good faith' in wishing to get in touch with me.
• A summary of my phone call to the lawyer in response to the above.
• Another Ho' note to AUSNet, and this is AUSNet's reply. It's a good one.
• I wrote a letter to the lawyer after the phone call. I have yet to receive a response to this letter. I guess that means it worked, at least for my purposes.

More NOTs

• Initial response - suitable as a framework for those outside the US receiving Ho' notes. Also good to cc: to your admin in such a case.

• Response to ISP when they asked Gregg to just do as the Ho' says. Gregg gave them an eloquent 'no thank you'. This is also suitable as a framework for your own use should you inadvertently find that you have signed on with an ISP of deficient spine.

• Gregg and XENU ask her to please either send proper paper legal stuff or give it up - that is, shit or get off the pot.

Cancelbunnies on the loose!

Here's a pile of cancels. Note the approach of cancelling around the world simultaneously, in an attempt to utterly kill the post in question.