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http://www.konradwest.com/2006/04/jehovahs-witnesses-shut-down-another-dissenters-website
Jehovah’s Witnesses shut down another dissenter’s website.
In December 2005, I wrote about how Jehovah’s Witnesses bullied Peter Mosier into shutting down his website Quotes, which contained a substantial number of embarrassing excerpts from JW publications.
Not content with that, they have shut down another dissenter’s website, this time using the takedown provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
Dallas resident David Gladden was raised a Jehovah’s Witness, and left the religion in 1998 at age 26. Gladden’s website, davidgladden.com, contained information about Jehovah’s Witnesses, including a mirror of Peter Mosier’s Quotes website and a PDF copy of their top secret Branch Organization Manual.
On March 14, the Watchtower Society–the chief legal corporation of Jehovah’s Witnesses–used the takedown provisions of the DMCA to get Gladden’s hosting provider AceHost to remove his website in its entirety.
The crazy thing about the DMCA is that it doesn’t require any evidence of copyright infringement; it only requires a good faith belief by the copyright owner that the material is infringing. (See the DMCA takedown article on Wikipedia.)
(On a side note, AceHost handled the situation most irresponsibly, shutting down Gladden’s website without advising him, even after the fact. It wasn’t until Gladden asked what had happened–simply thinking their servers were down–that they informed him of the reason his site was shut down. In addition, they refused to restore his site unless the Watchtower gives permission, have not advised him of what material is claimed to be infringing, and still have not provided Gladden with a copy of the DCMA takedown notice from the Watchtower Society.)
I emailed Gladden soon after finding out about his situation, and he kindly gave detailed answers to my questions. When asked about why he didn’t send a DMCA counter-notice (which would likely result in a copyright infringement lawsuit), he responded in part:
I decided not to take this to court because I feel I can do far more good by not going to court. I observed the actions of the Watchtower Society in handling the Quotes.watchtower.ca website. They claimed damages to the sum of $100,000. My instinct tells me their goal was not really to get $100,000 from Peter Mosier, the owner of the Quotes website. I suspect they had two other goals.
- To get possession of the watchtower.ca domain, which they desperately needed since all of their other primary websites used the word “watchtower”, such as watchtower.com, watchtower.org, watchtower.co.uk, etc. They knew they could not accuse Peter of cybersquatting because he was obviously not doing this; he was hosting a web site about the Watchtower Society which is quite obviously a legitimate use of the domain name.
- To financially break Peter through a very long and expensive court case. Peter had two simple choices: lose everything in his fight and end up being forced to settle, or just settle without a fight. Either way the settlement would have contained a gag order that would prevent him from being able to talk about the activities of the Watchtower Society in any meaningful way. Unfortunately Peter ended up being gagged by the settlement he was forced to sign.
After the Watchtower Society first sent him a letter under the DMCA Act, his lawyer responded by requesting a list of the alleged copyright violations and offered to work with them in an attempt to find a balance in the web site’s content. After several months of waiting, the Watchtower Society never responded to the request. Instead they just filed the lawsuit. This told me the Watchtower Society was never interested in negotiating. They wanted all or nothing. I could only assume the same would happen with my web site.
I did not want to get caught up in such a mess with the possibility of being gagged. I will not do anything that could jeopardise my ability to expose the lies and morely questionable activities of the Watchtower Society. I can do far more toward my goals by staying out of court and continuing to talk about the Watchtower Society without any restrictions.
Despite my righteous indignance at letting the the Watchtower Society get away with abusing the DMCA to suppress legitimate dissent, I have to say that Gladden is right. By not fighting, he’s free to talk about Jehovah’s Witnesses, whereas the gag order on Peter Mosier means he risks another lawsuit if he discusses the Watchtower Society in a public forum.
However, though Gladden has so far avoided a lawsuit, any future attempts at exposing the Watchtower Society will again put him at risk, as he mentions:
… one cannot demonstrate their questionable doctrines and activities without quoting copious amounts of their publications, however, according to the lawyer I spoke to, it is very difficult to do this without violating copyright law.
It would be nice if the Watchtower Society would play nice, but that’s pretty unlikely. What needs to happen is a reversal, or at least amendment of the DMCA. As it stands, it’s too easy for copyright owners to use the DMCA to stop fair use. And since the AUSFTA means that the DMCA will in theory be implemented here in Australia, I also risk the wrath of the Society if I quote their publications.
So I won’t.
I’ll just point you to reexamine.org–a reworked version of Peter Mosier’s original Quotes site–that does for Jehovah’s Witnesses what Operation Clambake did for Scientology.