Amy Alexander on 18 Mar 2001 11:06:00 -0000 |
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[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> slashdot chooses its battle and complies to scientologyclaims |
Drazen Pantic wrote: > category. But, the entities that were subject of those posts were not as > scary as Scientology is, so Slashdot has decided many times to go along > with smaller or bigger violations. Now, that they faced the strong > response from an entity they do not understand and are afraid of, CmdrTaco > and friends decided that it would be most opportune for them to remove the > post and try to forget about it... > I think it's not quite so cut and dry. They replaced the comment with "information and links about Scientology." That info and links covers topics like a woman who died "at the hands of Scientology," Scientology forcing items off of E-bay over a questionable copyright allegation, etc. The story wrapped up by suggesting that Slashdot readers petition members of Congress regarding the DMCA issues that put Slashdot in this presumably losing legal position. The story and various posters linked to sites with variously annotated versions of the copyrighted text which was removed. If CmdrTaco et al really wanted to forget about it, they would have just removed the post from the page and not mentioned it. Instead, they posted a story about it, replacing the probably-not-attention-grabbing original post with a highly public story depicting Scientology in a negative light. They also provided links to the same cited copyrighted material which was pulled from Slashdot. I think this is a more productive tactic in the long run. Bullying organizations can often win such legal battles (sounds like /.'s lawyer's told them their chances were not good here.). This would leave /. with the legal fees and the material still offline. By responding with negative publicity, this fights fire with flames, and hopefully enough of this sort of thing gives all the Bullies with Lawyers out there reason to think twice before taking legal action as a knee jerk reaction to everything. Many of the reader comments are positive about CmdrTaco's generating negative publicity for Scientology. Other posts add to the collection of links to negative info on Scientology, which presumably was also part of Taco's plan. So, I don't see this as the end of Slashdot; the precedent it sets is that having a post pulled from /. through legal means doesn't mean it actually goes away. -@ _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold