Scene 3

Vs.

Julia Rijnvis and Karin Spaink

Karin Spaink: (writer, essayist)

This is a list with people that joined the action against Scientology. You will find a huge list of Dutch Internet users and also some other places outside Holland - only Germany and Finland- where the Fishman documents are available. At the end of the list you'll see a long list of documents that had to be removed. In these cases, the provider was too afraid to maintain the pages or there was a law suit.

Scientology does strange things on the Internet. They simply wipe out messages of people. They intimidate people or attack providers. The seize computer equipment and have even tried to delete newsgroups. I think this behaviour is not tolerable. It is a strange way of acting and they should be stopped.

2 Vandaag tried to contact the Scientology members. We were not allowed to enter their building at the Nieuwe Zijds Voorburgwal. A spokeswoman of the Scientology Church visited our editors room:

Julia Rijnvis: (Church of Scientology Representative)

It has been suggested that we want to attack freedom of speech. This is not the issue. It is about copyrights. There are some documents in Mr. Fishman's statement that are protected by our copyrights.

It is not the complete statement, of course Fishman can say what he wants to say. But there are some parts in his statement that are under our copyright and it is only those parts that we are protecting.

Karin Spaink:

I don't think this is actually true. The only thing I did was putting a publicly accessible and complete court document on my homepage. Indeed there are parts from Scientology material that were handed over as proofs. But all I do is publish a court document, nothing more, nothing less. If there is some copyrighted material on my homepage that was not included in the court file, I will remove it immediately.

Scientology wants to remove the court statements because they consider the texts that are quoted to be a big secret, and they intend to sell it for a lot of money. This is probably the clue in this issue.