Home ›

Scientology Lawyer Promises to Continue "Appropriate Action"

Apr 17, 2002  By Don Marti
 in
Scientology exposé site Xenu.net rode a DMCA censorship buzz to a prime spot in a Google search for "Scientology". But will the Scientology law firm of Moxon & Kobrin keep the letters coming?

We asked Scientology attorney Helena Kobrin if Google's new policy of making DMCA takedown letters public and the resulting boost to the Google standings of Scientology critic site Xenu.net would affect her firm's decision to send future takedown letters. Here is her answer:

Dear Mr. Marti,

I am somewhat surprised by your questions. I am an intellectual property attorney, and my job is to protect my clients' rights in their copyrighted works and their trademarks. When we learn of infringements to those rights, we take appropriate actions to protect them by writing to the infringer and, if a service provider is involved, to the service provider. We take follow-up actions as needed.

Frankly, this is the simplicity of what we do. It is the same thing that is done by all intellectual property attorneys in protecting their clients' rights. It has nothing to do with search engines or criticism. Will we stop doing our jobs because someone disagrees or puts our letters on the Internet? No more so than I would stop in going after someone who breached a contract or would fail to prosecute a murderer, a thief, or an embezzler if I were a prosecutor or would back off on stopping someone from dumping toxic waste if I were an environmental attorney merely because someone criticized my actions.

Sincerely,Helena Kobrin

Don Marti is technical editor of Linux Journal.

email: dmarti@ssc.com

______________________

Comments

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

Re: Scientology Lawyer Promises to Continue

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 05/03/2002 - 02:00.

Helena Kobrin is just another cultie. Anything she says and anything she does is soley for the purpose of attacking and destroying critics of her cult and subverting the social structure of the US and other nations to put the Nazi-esque Scientology regime in control. Anytime you hear some official statement from a scientologist just imagine that you are listening to the devil. The devil always lies, if not in fact then at least in purpose because anytime the devil does tell the truth it is to forward an evil goal. Scientology is exactly the same. This woman is a plague upon the legal system. She and her buddy Kendrick Moxon need to be disbarred for unethical behavior. They follow Hubbard's policy of filing harassment lawsuits, which is solid grounds for disbarment all by itself. I hope I live to see the day when Miscavige and the rest of those amoral criminal thugs are finally brought to justice. Then they can sit in a cage for a change and Kobrin and Moxon can go flip burgers for a living.

Lee

Re: Scientology Lawyer Promises to Continue

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Sun, 04/28/2002 - 02:00.

If she really meant what she said, she would have taken www.xenu.net to court in Norway for copyright infringement long ago. But $cientology hasnt, because they dont have a case.

Re: Scientology Lawyer Promises to Continue

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Sun, 04/28/2002 - 02:00.

> No more so than I would stop in going after ... a murderer,

Does the name LISA MCPHERSON mean anything to her?

http://www.xenu.net/archive/deaths/

It's crowded at the moral high ground

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 04/18/2002 - 02:00.

Everybody wants to be thought of as the good guy, so they rationalise their actions. If this means classifying the people you're attacking as equivalent to perpetrators of murder and toxic-waste dumping, in order to forget the fact you're attacking them on behalf of brainwashing, censorious, violent s***** like the Church of Scientology, then so be it, it seems.

(Yes, I fully realise the irony of my colourful depiction of the CoS above. However, the difference is: the CoS *is* as I described, whereas Kobrin likes to think of Google as *equivalent to* murderers and waste-dumpers to morally vindicate her actions.)

Re: It's crowded at the moral high ground

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 04/29/2002 - 02:00.

A trademark holder has a legal obligation to protect their Trademarks and Service Marks, as well as their copyrights. What the Church of Scientology is doing is protecting what they legally own. Anyone who illegally utilises their intellectual property is breaking the law, and the Church of Scientology lawyers would be seriously remiss in their duties and obligations if they did not take appropriate legal actions to protect the interests of their client.

This is not solely about the Church of Scientology but the rights of the owners of intellectual properties to be protected by the appropriate laws of the land.

Re: It's crowded at the moral high ground

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 04/29/2002 - 02:00.

This is not solely about the Church of Scientology but the rights of the owners of intellectual properties to be protected by the appropriate laws of the land.

Is a trademark/IP issue or are they just using a convenient law to beat up on their critics? Unfortunately, they have a long history of doing the later...

LinuxToday comments auto-censorship braindead

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 04/18/2002 - 02:00.

Dear oh dear. The above comment contained the word "s.c.u.m" without the dots, which the LT comment system decided to render as "s*****". Please, aren't we going a stupidly bit too far in attempting not to offend?

If you must censor, please let it be by a human instead of a braindead automatic script that has no idea of context. Blanking out words doesn't stop an offensive message from offending. Better yet, don't make any pretense of censorship and make it clear that you're not responsible for readers' comments.

mostly fixed

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, 04/17/2002 - 02:00.

You fixed the stuff, but the description still has quotes in it.:

Scientology expos

D'oh!

scott's picture
Submitted by scott (not verified) on Wed, 04/17/2002 - 02:00.

That should be fixed too. E-mail me if anything else pops up.

Scott

scott@ssc.com

ps: Probably not worth the wrath, but that is one creeepy letter.

Headline breaks RSS feed

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, 04/17/2002 - 02:00.

FYI, this story and the story preceding it have quotes in the title. Your rss feed does not change them to " and thus breaks a lot of parsers. You might wanna fix that.

Cheers,

Sam

Re: Headline breaks RSS feed

scott's picture
Submitted by scott (not verified) on Wed, 04/17/2002 - 02:00.

Good to know. Thanks.

This still isn't fixed....

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 04/18/2002 - 02:00.

You cleaned up the title area, but not the description area.

Re: This still isn't fixed....

scott's picture
Submitted by scott (not verified) on Thu, 04/18/2002 - 02:00.

It sure looks fixed to me. I just checked the news.rss file and everything looks to be converted to "

Drop me an e-mail if you're still having trouble, I'd rather not drag it out in the comments of an article. ;)

Scott

scott@ssc.com

Webcast
More Resources
How to Build an Optimal Hadoop Cluster to Store and Maintain Unlimited Amounts of Data Using Microservers

Realizing the promise of Apache® Hadoop® requires the effective deployment of compute, memory, storage and networking to achieve optimal results. With its flexibility and multitude of options, it is easy to over or under provision the server infrastructure, resulting in poor performance and high TCO. Join us for an in depth, technical discussion with industry experts from leading Hadoop and server companies who will provide insights into the key considerations for designing and deploying an optimal Hadoop cluster.

Learn More

Sponsored by AMD

White Paper
More Resources
Red Hat White Paper: Using an Open Source Framework to Catch the Bad Guy

Built-in forensics, incident response, and security with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Every security policy provides guidance and requirements for ensuring adequate protection of information and data, as well as high-level technical and administrative security requirements for a system in a given environment. Traditionally, providing security for a system focuses on the confidentiality of the information on it. However, protecting the data integrity and system and data availability is just as important. For example, when processing United States intelligence information, there are three attributes that require protection: confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Learn more about catching the bad guy in this free white paper.

Learn More

Sponsored by DLT Solutions