Scientology
In 1995, the Church of Scientology began a legal campaign to remove what it held were copyright infringements and trade secrets from the Internet; see Scientology vs. the Internet. Spaink was one of the first famous Dutch Internet personalities and was one of the first of what became about a hundred Dutch people to put up pages containing the Fishman Affidavit in protest against the actions of the church.
The Church of Scientology responded by suing Karin Spaink and a large number of Internet providers, including XS4ALL, for copyright infringement. Part of the Fishman Affidavit were documents that Fishman had asserted to be the official teachings of Scientology. The defendants responded by challenging the church to prove it was actually the copyright holder of the disputed documents.
The church allowed a Dutch notary to compare the church-copyrighted documents with the texts on Spaink's homepage. Through her lawyers, Karin Spaink received a copy and started rewriting her homepage, just a week away from the court date for handling the motion for summary judgement. Spaink replaced the contested documents with an analysis of the documents, quoting liberally, but not too liberally from them; Dutch copyright law does not have a fair use provision, but allows quotation for purposes of scientific dissemination. A representative of the Church of Scientology used this occurrence to back up an assertion that the church had won the court case.
The hearing on the merits was decided more along both lines: it was found that service providers do have a responsibility for documents that users put up on their web site; however, any claims that Karin Spaink was breaking the church's copyright were found unfounded, because Spaink had reworked her homepage as soon as she had discovered that the church indeed had valid claims to portions of the documents on that homepage. This implicitly meant that the scholarly study of the church's documents on Spaink's homepage was in fact legal according to the decision.
Court costs were divided equally between parties. In the Netherlands these usually run into (only) thousands of euros; contrast this with the hundreds of thousands of dollars that American Scientology adversaries had to pay after losing their own, US-based court cases. This may be an indication of why Spaink can still fight the church, and why it is claimed by Scientology critics that the barrage of law suits brought on by the church is not the making use of a legal right, but a form of harassment (barratry).
The Church of Scientology appealed this decision. A court date was originally planned for September 2002, but was postponed several times. Finally in September 2003, the court decided in favor of Spaink and the internet service providers on all points, including the below-mentioned decision on links.
The three judges found that Spaink and the providers might indeed have broken Dutch copyright law; quotation is not allowed of works that have not been previously published, and whether or not the release as evidence in a US court case counts as 'publication' was considered dubious. However, the judges felt that they did not have to rule on this subject, because European law states that quotation is legal in case the quotation serves a higher goal. The court held it proven that Scientology is an organisation that tries to undermine democracy, and therefore ruled that Spaink had the right to quote the Church in her exposé.
Scientology appealed once more, this time to the Supreme Court of Netherlands. In July 2005, a few days before the court was expected to rule, Scientology withdrew the appeal. The Supreme Court dismissed Scientology's claims while accepting Scientology's withdrawal. As a consequence of this withdrawal, Scientology has no possibility to appeal to the European Court, because this is only possible when all legal means on country level have been exhausted. The verdict of the appeal court stands, but the Supreme Court did not add an evaluation of its own.
Spaink has continued to criticize Scientology, and actively participates in Project Chanology's monthly pickets against the organization.
Read more about this topic: Karin Spaink