Scientology vs. Panoussis Ruling

The Swedish High Court has rejected the appeal in the Zenon Panoussis case, where Panoussis was accused of distributing certain documents of the Church of Scientology in violation of their copyright. The case has been ongoing for some time and has more twists and turns than I can possibly summarize here, but we can cut to the chase: Panoussis lost, and lost big. There is apparently one more court in Sweden which can be appealed to, so it's not entirely over yet. Here's the report from the trial. The submitter provided many more links and information, included below.

leto writes "The Swedish High Court upheld the ruling today in the case of Scientology vs Panoussis, where Scientology accuses Panoussis of copyright infringement of religious trade secrets. Panoussis believes the public should be warned against Scientology, and is therefore trying to legally publish various materials that would warn people against Scientology. He is the guy that submitted the secret OT's to the Swedish parliament, which caused quite a diplomatic incident when the US interfered with the Swedish legal system because the Swedish Offentlighetsprincip then caused these documents to be available to everyone, but has also done other things as reported by slashdot such as protecting the Flashback site as reported by slashdot before.

Having lost now means that apart from needing to pay the (minimal) damages of $2000 for copyright infringement, he needs to pay an additional $40,000 on legal costs for the Scientology lawyers, on top of the $150,000 of legal costs that were the results of the previous episodes in this court case.

There was a minority opinion from one of the judges. She regards the OTs to have been legally published, something Panoussis focussed on in this case, because in Europe, the right to 'fair use' depends on the texts having been published. Panoussis has already appealed to the Supreme Court.

Regardless of which party is right, this case shows clearly that anonymity is a right you need, to fight the denial of services practices that large institutions apply towards individuals in the current legal systems. Though Panoussis will disagree with me on this. He has always told me that if you believe in something, you should be willing to make the sacrifice, or as he put it, you need to defend freedom, and not take it for granted, but I can't help but feel that it should not be necessary for one person to sacrifice his life for other people's freedom.

If we only had micropayments properly working, I'm sure he would be able to pay the legal costs from contributions all over the net.

More information can be found either here, here, here and in the newsgroup alt.religion.scientology Panoussis's latest project is an advanced search engine to help locate information about Scientology at search.freewinds.cx."