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Scientologists Vs. GoDaddy: Controlling Online Parodies

Chilling Effects Team, June 19, 2013

Abstract: The Church of Scientology gets GoDaddy to take down an obvious parody site, but the EFF is on the case.

As regular visitors to Chilling Effects know, many of the notices we receive and make available to the public in our database are essentially notices that have been sent from one automatic process to another.
Although these can sometimes be quite revealing, even in their sterile automaticity, they are typically pretty non-descript. E.g., Content-holder X asks that Google remove these N thousand URLs that allegedly infringe copyrighted material from its search results.
However, Chilling Effects does also have more “personal” notices, whether sent by individuals to corporations, or from individuals to individuals. These tend to contain more unique facts, and be more interesting in general. It might also be fair to say that a greater percentage of these more “personal” notices represent edge cases, fact patterns where the outcomes or legal analysis are not so clear-cut, and whether the system is working as intended is not certain.

We recently received one such interesting notice, and present it here for your perusal.

As denizens of the Internet know perhaps all too well, the organization known as the Church of Scientology International, (“CSI”) is a controversial one to say the least, and has a long and interesting past when it comes to its presence online, to the extent that there is a Wikipedia article “Scientology and the Internet” describing decades worth of efforts by CSI to prevent anyone from criticizing it or revealing its “secrets” online.

As this article points out, CSI has attempted to control the dissemination of internal church documents, described by CSI lawyers as “"copyrighted, trademarked, unpublished trade secrets" both by engaging with specific individuals like Dennis Erlich, a former high-ranking CSI member, by seeking to have UseNet delete entire groups, and the Internet Archive to delete entire sites , and with a series of lawsuits, several of which featured raids on private homes by federal marshals in the U.S. as well as raids on the homes of foreign nationals. CSI has also more recently battled with Anonymous and Wikileaks.
The success of such tactics either in controlling how and when CSI information reached public or in managing CSI’s public image, is questionable.

It is lawsuits, or the threat of them, that have featured most prominently in CSI’s recent “brand management” activities. CSI has sent many take-down notices in the past, including notices to YTMND.com, Gawker, Google, International Freezone Panama and to individuals. Quite a few are already in our database.

CSI’s latest attempt to use copyright and trademark law to suppress criticism of itself and its activities was a take-down letter issued to GoDaddy, the domain name registrar and host, concerning a parody website hosted by GoDaddy, cheerupwillsmith.com. chilling Effects is pleased to be able to include this notice in our database as part of our mission to promote transparency about online cease and desist activities.

Sadly, GoDaddy immediately took the site in question down, leaving any questions of fair use, nominative fair use, parody or the First Amendment to be asked by others. The letter is also interesting in that it attempts to use trademark claims as a way of censoring content, a trend Chilling Effects is researching right now.

Happily, the creators of cheerupwillsmith.com. are being helped in their efforts to keep their website back up by the hard-working individuals at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. You can read the EFF’s blog post about the situation here, and EFF legal director Corynne McSherry’s letter to CSI’s lawyer here.

Keep an eye on this story. It’s hard to imagine even the Scientologists successfully intimidating the EFF, but what GoDaddy, caught in the middle, will do as a path of least resistance is by no means certain.

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