THE CRUISER AND FREE SPEECH


Scientology church put stop to leaked Tom Cruise web video

We read:

"Scientologists have forced internet giant Google to remove a leaked web video that featured Hollywood star Tom Cruise praising the niche religion. The Scientology video was removed from Google's YouTube video site today. "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Church of Scientology International," said a message on the site.

A Google Australia spokesman denied the company giant had "buckled under pressure" from the Church of Scientology, but confirmed Google had "complied with our legal obligation to remove material".

Source

There is a bit of a surge lately in using copyright laws to suppress speech. If any of these cases get to court, however, I think they will die. Copyright laws do permit use of excerpts and that is all that happened above as far as I can work out.


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I have noted before threats by the Church of Scientology to sue anybody who distributes an unauthorized biography of Tom Cruise -- threats that have succeeeded in getting the book pulled from some bookstores. It seems however that the book really contains very little of substance. There is a run-down of what is in it here. The only bit in it that I thought vaguely interesting was the following:

"Morton says Tom "progressed to what Scientologists call 'the Wall of Fire,' or Operating Thetan III, where the secrets of the universe according to Hubbard [are] revealed." Allegedly, "Tom found the knowledge he had just received disturbing and alarming, as he struggled to reconcile the creationist myth with the more practical teachings contained in the lower levels of Scientology...Tom [complained] that he had studied all these years and the whole faith was about space aliens."'

Some Cruise scientology craziness that apparently is not in the book can be found here

Posted by John Ray