IP Democracy: Scientology & Hollywood Both Hate Pirated Videos

Scientology has long been identified with top Hollywood stars, but a kerfluffle involving a presumably purloined video of leading Scientology advocate Tom Cruise even more closely aligns the two communities. A ten-minute video of the actor and Hollywood powerbroker has been circulating the Internet over the past three days and the notoriously litigious Church of Scientology has been playing a game of Internet whack-a-mole by issuing take-down notices all over the place.

Scientology is invoking its copyright in the video, which presumably was prepared for internal purposes only and seems to be some kind of recruiting pitch. Many web sites have posted a You Tube version of the video, but attempts to play the embedded video on most of these sites are fruitless. No sooner does someone post it to You Tube than Scientology issues a take-down notice.

As of this morning, however, Nick Denton's Gawker still has the video. Denton stored a copy of it, removing his dependence on YouTube and other sites fearful of Scientology's lawyers, and refuses to take it down. "It's newsworthy; and we will not be removing it," Denton writes.

As Salon's Farhad Manjoo notes, in its effort to snuff out a "pirated" video, Scientology is facing the very same issue that Hollywood must manage when it comes to the Internet: the inability to control content.

The disputes mainly involve the unauthorized distribution of the Church's intellectual property, which makes the fight not really very different from the battle that other forces in the entertainment industry have waged against the Web. And in the same way that the record labels are losing their war against the Internet, so too is Scientology. This video's out there, and it's going to stay out there.

As Manjoo also notes, Scientology has long engaged in legal battles to keep text content off the Internet, but this is the first time that I could find where the group has attempted to contain video content on the web. One big question is why Scientology is trying to stop people from seeing what is so obviously a marketing video.

If you've watched the video, you will understand better. Cruise, although trying to sell the virtues of Scientology, sounds, shall we say, a little bit off-center. It's not so much the mockable statements he makes, which have been well documented elsewhere ("We are the authorities on getting people off drugs. We are the authorities on the mind. We are the authorities on improving conditions. We can rehabilitate criminals.")

It's not that he's jumping up and down and talking in crazy ways, although there are points where the way Cruise laughs makes me very uncomfortable. It's that you literally can't understand what he's talking about. He flits from concept to concept, from reference to reference and in the end it's hard to understand what's so great about Scientology.

The video is particularly damning given the timing of the appearance, coinciding as it does with the publication of Andrew Morton's unauthorized biography of Cruise, which paints the actor as a pin-eyed zealot who goes to nutty extremes to support Scientology. So, unlike Hollywood, which contends it loses revenues from unauthorized video distribution, Scientology is merely losing face with the Cruise video.

Update: True to form, Scientology's lawyers have sent a take-down notice to Gawker, which won't comply, saying that Gawker's publication of the video is "fair use." Scientology stretches the bounds of credulity when it suggests that Gawker's publication of the video is a violation of several criminal statutes under California law, including receiving stolen property and interstate transportation of stolen goods.

Update: Well, Denton and Gawker are really stepping into doo-doo today. Not only are they fighting off Scientologists, but Denton may get booted off of Facebook. It seems that Denton posted some unflattering screenshots of American Lawyer founder Steve Brill's daughter, which he copied off of Facebook, which is a violation of the site's terms of use.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on January 16, 2008 10:27 AM to IP Democracy