Wikileads

Why hasn’t the Church of Scientology sued Wikileaks? They have sued numerous other organizations for offenses far milder than releasing their entire secret bibles for public view, as Wikileaks did on March 24. So far Scientology has done nothing but send Wikileaks a letter. An angry letter, written by lawyers, requesting the documents be removed.

But Wikileaks published that, too.

It may only be a matter of time. Maybe the Church’s lawyers are gathering data and documents and preparing to take the remorseless leakers to court. Legally speaking, Scientology likely has strong grounds to win a suit: Non-copyright holders can only publish copyrighted documents if certain conditions are met. This is called fair use, and it involves a four-factor test, a test that Wikileaks could fail.

Then there’s the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which provides procedures for copyright holders and privacy seekers so they can get Internet service providers to remove offending material from a website. Wikileaks could run into trouble here as well.

But maybe it’s more complicated than that. Maybe the Church of Scientology knows that suing Wikileaks would only make their secret bibles even more viral - and thus less secret.

Why? It’s called the Streisand Effect, and this is how it works:

1. Somebody posts something on the Internet. A video, say. An offensive video. People watch it, it gets sent around.
2. The person in the video finds out about it and gets pissed. They contact the video’s poster to ask that the video be removed.
3. Others find out about the attempt to censor the offensive video. They mirror it, download it, spread it around even more. The video is suddenly everywhere. It has become effectively uncensorable.

A recent example: Tom Cruise’s incomprehensible rant on how obsessed he is with Scientology. The Church tried to censor that, too. But the blogosphere picked up on it (as it tends to do), posts were rampant, the video was mirrored everywhere, Jerry O’Connell responded, and the rest is history.

If you’re the one person who has not yet seen this video, here’s a link to one of many YouTube posts:

And what about Operating Thetan? Although the blogosphere has been quiet about the secret bibles in recent days, when Wikileaks originally posted the books, people noticed. When Wikileaks received the lawyerly letter, more Internet chatter ensued.

Tons more. So much more that it merited a chart:

But it’s just the chatter that will hurt Scientology. People downloaded Operating Thetan, and then they downloaded the next set of Scientology documents Wikileaks released. They analyzed them and discussed them. So if Wikileaks is forced to censor Scientology’s secrets, others will post them in other places. They will be far more ubiquitous than they already are, and the Church will lose more money than it already has lost.

So if the Church sues Wikileaks, Wikileaks could cause them more harm than if the Church lets the matter rest. That’s how the Internet works, and there’s little getting around it.