WASHINGTON -- The Church of Scientology has managed to yank references to anti-Scientology websites from the Google search engine.
Citing the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Scientology lawyers are claiming that Google may no longer include anti-Scientology sites that allegedly infringe upon the Church of Scientology's intellectual property.
A letter from Google to the Xenu.net Scientology-protest site says: "We removed certain specific URLs in response to a notification.... Had we not removed these URLs, we would be subject to a claim for copyright infringement, regardless of its merits."
So far, the DMCA has come under fire because it bans most attempts to bypass or disable copy-protection technology. But Scientology is relying on another section of the 1998 law, which says a "service provider shall not be liable" for copyright infringements -- if it moves with dispatch to delete any "reference or link to material or activity claimed to be infringing."
Until this week, anyone typing in "Scientology" on the wildly popular search engine found references to the Xenu.net site in the first page of results.
Now Xenu.net and clambake.org have virtually disappeared from Google's database.
When using the DMCA as a legal club to thwap critics, Scientology must claim that its copyrighted material has been unlawfully expropriated.
Among the ostensibly infringing sites: Excerpts from an internal report on a Scientology member who died under mysterious circumstances after allegedly being held against her will, and photographs of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and others juxtaposed with Adolf Hitler.
This isn't the first time Scientology has used copyright threats to stifle criticism.
As far back as August 1995, Scientology sued one of its former members for posting anti-church information to the Internet and persuaded a federal judge to permit the seizure of his computer. The church then sued The Washington Post for reporting on the computer seizure and quoting from public court records.
Last November, Scientology used the DMCA to pressure a U.S. Internet provider to remove the church's secret scriptures from the scientology-kills.org site. DMCA threats from the church seem to be becoming so common that Dave Touretzsky, a scientist at Carnegie Mellon, has even drafted a form letter that can be sent in reply.
Since Xenu.net and its companion sites are in the Netherlands, Scientology can't use U.S. law to remove the pages directly. But in getting Google to delete them from its mammoth database, the church hopes to remove one of the most obvious ways that Internet users can stumble across the sites.
Xenu.net does have the option to reply to Google and try to make its way back into the database by refuting Scientology's claims. The DMCA offers that way out -- but Xenu.net's publisher would have to agree to the jurisdiction of a U.S. court.
One Internet executive in the Netherlands reported this week that Scientology "harassed" him and his upstream providers for years because he hosted an anti-Scientology site.
Hubbard's secret scriptures teach that 75 million years ago, an evil galactic overlord named Xenu solved the galaxy's overpopulation problem by freezing excess people and transporting the bodies to Teegeeack, now called Earth. After the hapless travelers were defrosted, they were chained to volcanoes that were blown up by hydrogen bombs -- and their disembodied spirits continue to haunt mankind today.
