Karin Spaink (born 1957 in Amsterdam) is a journalist, writer and feminist.
She is known as somebody who will actively, but legally fight the system in order to right wrongs. She has fought, amongst others, new-age writers who claim all diseases are only a psychological phenomenon, the Church of Scientology, police officers whom she claims sexually harassed teenagers, and American pro-abortionists who got an anti-abortionist site banned because of texts that may be construed as a literal, illegal call for mutilation and murder of medical doctors who perform abortions.
(Spaink herself is pro-choice on the abortion issue, but felt that freedom of speech prevailed in this last case.)
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Karin Spaink first got into the national limelight by accusing new-age writers such as Louise Hay, Thorwald Dethlefsen and Bernie Siegel of over-simplifying physical ailments by reducing them to a purely psychological phenomenon. Spaink, herself suffering from multiple sclerosis, was insulted by the suggestion that her disease was nothing more than the result of her own lack of willingness to heal.
Her essay Het strafbare lichaam ('the punishable body') spawned new words such as kwakdenken ('quack thinking') and orenmaffia ('ear mafia') that even made it to the dictionary. The latter word derived from the expression that it is 'all between the ears', in other words 'all in the mind'.
In 1995, the Church of Scientology had started its war against the internet. Spaink was one of the first famous Dutch people to use the internet and was one of about 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 whole lot of internet providers, including XS4All, for copyright infringement. Part of the Fishman Affidavit were documents that Fishman had claimed 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.
This put the church in a tough spot, because it claimed that those documents were church secrets; once it had proved the genuineness of those documents, the cat would be out of bag. This was important to the church, because it claims that the believers have to read the documents in a certain order, and only when they are ready for them, in order to reach a state of Clear.
The church finally gave in and let a Dutch notary 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 the kort geding. A kort geding is a sort of pre-law suit, in case the claimants feel there is a certain amount of urgency (for instance, when they fear copyrighted documents will be spread further before this distribution can be stopped).
Spaink replaced the contested documents by an analysis of them, quoting liberally, but not too liberally from them. Dutch copyright law does not have a fair use provision, but allows quotation for purposes of, amongst others, scientific dissemination.
Interestingly enough, a representative of the Church of Scientology claimed after that the church had won the court case.
The following 'real' court case 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 scientific study of the church's documents on Spaink's homepage were found legal.
Court costs were divided equally between parties. In the Netherlands these usually run into 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 ISPs 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 yet, and whether or not the release as evidence in a US court case counts as 'publication' was held 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 for proven that Scientology is an organisation that tries to undermine democracy, and that therefore Spaink had the right to quote the Church in its exposé.
In the original court case, the judge held it for law that ISP's whose customers on their homepages link to copyright infringement are as liable as if the customers infringed on that copyright themselves.
This part of the judge's decision caused quite an uproar in the Dutch internet community, where many claim that a link is not a mechanism for publishing works but merely a reference to a work, although there are a fair number of voices who feel the judge's decision was correct.
In the verdict of the appeal in September 2003, this ruling was reverted.
See also: civil law
Quacks
Scientology
Effects of this court case
Bibliography
External links
