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Weiye Loh

Tom Morris - Catholicism and copyright - 0 views

blog.tommorris.org/...3405197609

Copyright Church Religion Scientology

shared by Weiye Loh on 20 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • One of the most amusing things about Scientology
  • is the fact that the scriptures of the church are copyright and some are kept very secret. The business model is simple: you have to pay to read more
  • The Bible isn’t copyright. The Qu’ran isn’t copyright. If you want to publish your own version of a huge range of religious texts, you can. Pop over to Wikisource and you can read copyright-free editions of the Bible, prayers, the Apocrypha and the Tao Te Ching among many thousands of other religious texts (and why not some atheist/humanist manifestos too?). This enables scholarship: theologians, historians and others can make their own commentaries building atop these scriptures. Critical scholarship of the sort Biblical commentators do is helped by not having the threat of a lawsuit hanging over one if one quotes a bit too much from the text.
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  • What makes the Scientology situation so egregious is that no independent theological, philosophical or critical reflection can happen when the text is locked away. There seems to me to be a conflict here. If you believe you have access to a truth that has the ability to save people in the afterlife or to dramatically make their life better in this one, you have some kind of duty to share it. Or rather, if you are keeping your religious truths to yourself and not sharing them, people have very good reason to believe you might be a huckster.
  • But I found out today that Scientology is not alone in locking up their teachings behind the wall of copyright. The Catholic Church does too. All of the copyright in the papal writings of Pope Benedict XVI now belong to the Vatican publishing house, Libreria Editrice Vaticana.
  • The writings of the Pope will not go out of copyright until 70 years after his death.
  • What benefit is this to anyone? Did the lack of copyright protection for writings of Popes before the current copyright regime prevent the spread of Catholicism? If everything the Pope wrote was in public domain, would it prevent the development of the “useful Arts and Sciences”, as the U.S. Constitution puts it? The motivation of the Pope is really not the same as the motivation of the Walt Disney company. Without copyright protection, the Church will not fall to bits. Indeed, one interesting question is what the copyright status of the Catholic Catechism is. This is the basic doctrine of the Catholic faith. I would presume it is copyright in much the same way. If we criticise Scientology for locking it’s scriptures up behind copyright, surely the same could be said for the Catechism? For a body like the Catholic Church, it would seem totally reasonable and straight-forward to simply release all their materials completely as public domain.
Weiye Loh

Wk 4 Online censorship & digital access: Mormon Church Attacks Wikileaks - 6 views

WIKILEAK RELEASES SECRET CHURCH DOCUMENTS! The First Link is an article regarding Wikileaks releasing a 'copyrighted' and confidential Church document of the Mormons (also known as the Church of J...

Mormons Scientology Wikileaks Copyright Censorship

started by guanyou chen on 31 Aug 09 1 follow-up, last by Weiye Loh on 31 Aug 09
Weiye Loh

God hates hackers: Anonymous warns Westboro Baptist Church, 'stop now, or else' - 0 views

www.digitaltrends.com/...aptist-church-stop-now-or-else

hacktivism Anonymous Church Religion

shared by Weiye Loh on 19 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Vigilante “hacktivist” group Anonymous has a new target: Westboro Baptist Church. In an open letter to the notorious Kansas-based church, Anonymous promises “vicious” retaliation against the organization if they do not “cease & desist” their protest activities.
  • Led by pastor Fred Phelps, Westboro Baptist has become infamous for picketing the funerals of US soldiers — events know as “Love Crusades” — and for their display of signs bearing inflammatory messages, like “God hates fags.” The church has long argued that their Constitutionally-protected right to freedom of speech allows them to continue their derogatory brand of social activism.
  • Anonymous also considers itself an “aggressive proponent” of free speech, having recently launched attacks on organizations they consider to be enemies of that right: Companies like PayPal, Visa and Master Card, who stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks after the anti-secrecy organization released a massive cache of US embassy cables; and the government of Egypt, which attempted to cut off its
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  • Other Anonymous targets include the Church of Scientology and, most recently, cyber-security company HBGary, which attempted to infiltrate Anonymous. In response, the lose-knit hacker group released 71,800 HBGary emails, which revealed highly dubious activities by the company, almost instantaneously destroying HBGary’s reputation and potentially setting it on a path to financial ruin.
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