Saturday, April 28, 2012

Church threatens legal action against parishoners

A site purporting to be run by Jehovah's Witnesses for the purpose of electronically distributing brief daily readings of scripture and commentary from its own church claims to have received a cease and desist letter from the church for copyright infringement.

This same church has sued others for similar re-postings of its writings, without critique.  Postings with critique are allowed by federal law.  Hence, the Watchtower Society's action has had the strange, counterproductive effect of turning up the volume of critique due to silencing its own words.

The second negative effect is the fact that current members in good standing are turned off by this action, so much they appear to be losing their faith.  Click the above link to see faith crumbling before your very eyes.

This is not the first time this church has done this.  Previously, the church silenced a site containing only a collection of literature quotes by suing the webmaster and taking ownership of the site.

Why?  They claimed the quotes "embarrassed" them.  (The official court papers could not easily be found on the Internet today by this writer, though I've personally read them in the past. If interested, try searching for Watchtower Society vs. Peter Mosier c. 2005 in Canada.)

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