Wikileads

Not too long ago, Wikileaks posted two versions of the confidential Mormon Church Handbook of Instructions, until now only possessed by Church leaders.

Yesterday the Church issued a copyright infringement notice to Wikileaks. It also sent one to the Wikimedia Foundation because Wikinews had written an article about the Wikileaked document (Wikileaks is not associated with the Wikimedia Foundation). Scribd, an online document-posting site which had posted the handbook, received a notice as well.

Scribd removed the handbook. Wikinews had only linked to it. Wikileaks did not take the document down.

Wikileaks’ response:

“WikiLeaks will not remove the handbooks, which are of substantial interest to current and former mormons. WikiLeaks will remain a place were people from around the world can safely reveal the truth.”

The media - local, national and technological - investigated and commented:

The L.A. Times, the Salt Lake Tribune, Ars Tecnica, Slashdot.

And lots of bloggers. Some claimed the Mormon church is trying to “gag the internet,” and others thought Wikileaks had been sued.

Wikileaks has not been sued, but the “gag the internet” commentary, which probably originated at Wikileaks, is interesting. The Church isn’t trying to gag the internet. They just want their copyrighted material to remain under their control.

But is that still a reasonable expectation?

Some insight from the L.A. Times’ Webscout blog:

The majority of the text is humdrum procedural information, surely nothing you would classify as embarrassing, rife with “trade secrets,” or necessary to keep under wraps for the good of the parishioners. So then why is LDS making an attention-drawing stink about its publication?

Organizations have long had control over which part of their inner workings they want public and which they don’t.  But now that the Internet is getting better at sniffing out documents that people don’t want public, we’re getting a nice picture of how much of this secret information was secret for its own sake.  In other words, you have to wonder if there’s any reason for LDS to want to keep its boring bylaws in a vault other than, simply, because it has always done so.

That’s some stuff worth considering.