Reply to Notts County Solicitor
Except for the addition of this comment and changes to the layout and navigation links, the content of this page was last updated on 3 January 2002 at 1:45am.
C P. McKay, County Solicitor
Nottinghamshire County Council
County Hall
West Bridgford, Nottingham
NG2 7QP
United Kingdom
Dear Mr. McKay,
I have received an Email message sent by John Gass
The subject of the Email was a report (the JET
Report) which describes
how social workers in your County Council's Social Services Department
lead sexualy abused children into fabricating stories of their having
been subject to ritual satanic abuse. I can understand that your
County Council wishes to limit access to the report.
In the Email the claim is made that the Nottinghamshire County Council
has copyright in the report despite the fact that its main author
deems it in the public interest that the report be published, and the
fact that it is apparently already a public document. The Email also,
correctly, states that the report is on my web site (at
http://pobox.com/~mbaker/mirror).
However you ignore the fact that
both my web site and I are not located in the United Kingdom.
The Email also contains the threat: "I therefore give you notice that
unless the report is removed from the Website forthwith and for the
avoidance of doubt within 24 hours of receipt by you of this mail The
Nottinghamshire County Council will issue such Court Proceedings
including injunction proceedings or take any action as may be
appropriate."
My initial reaction was to comply with your demand. However on
further consideration I decided to just ignore what appear to be empty
threats, given that the "Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988",
which is quoted in the Email, only applies to actions taken in the
United Kingdom. As
Professor
Junger has already pointed out to you
"that Act specifically provides that copyright holders' exclusive
rights apply only to ``acts in the United Kingdom''".
However as Professor Junger has made very public his intention not to
be coerced into removing the report, I have decided to do likewise.
It is apparent from the press reports that your actions are
engendering that your efforts to suppress the truth about what
happened at Broxtowe have had something other than the effect that
your County Council wanted. Headlines like:
Wired News -
Ritual
Abuse Posting Sparks Furor
News.COM -
Drop
Report, Brits tell Canadian Site
MSN News -
Satanic
abuse freedom case goes global:
Council threatens
Canadian "mirror" site with legal action over publication of child
abuse report.
MSN News -
Freedom
battle over child abuse leak:
Journalists defy
legal attempt to prevent Internet publication of Broxtowe child
abuse files
UK Press Association -
Abuse
report on the web despite court order
News.COM -
Governments
strive to keep lid on the Net
Salon Magazine -
U.K.
tries to censor the Internet:
"An embarrassing report about a bungled satanic abuse investigation
brings out the British blue pencil brigade."
The Convergence -
Modern-day
sheriffs of Nottingham are at it again
News.COM -
Britain
pursues banned report
Wired News -
Little
Pig, I'll Blow Your Site Down
Wired News -
UK
Activist: Let 1,000 Mirror Sites Bloom
The Convergence -
Naughty,
naughty, Nottingham: Legal threats from
embarrassed British bureaucrats force Canadian to take controversial
report offline
It is also my position that, were you to seek an injunction from a
court of competent jurisdiction requiring me to remove the report from my
web site because of your County Council's claim of copyright, even if it could
establish that claim, my publication of the report on my web site is
"fair use".
The report is a compilation of facts, even if the allegations of
satanic rites that it discusses were fictions. As the United States
Supreme Court made clear in _Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural
Telephone Service Co., Inc._, 499 U.S. 340 (1991): "the copyright in a
factual compilation is thin." Since your County Council desires to
suppress the work, rather than to publish and sell it, they have
suffered no damages from the posting of the report on my web site;
since I am making the report available as a public service and receive
no compensation for doing so, I have received no profits from that
posting: facts that go a long way toward establishing that my posting
of the report is fair use. But the most important fact is that the
report that your County Council wants to suppress is a document whose
publication may assist in the prevention of further abuse of children
by public authorities who subscribe, for whatever reason, to fantasies
about satanic rites. As the report says: "We have to consider the
damage that may have been done to the children in working with them on
the basis that they had been involved in experiences such as the
slaughter of sheep and the killing of babies that had not actually
happened. What has been done to [Mary] by convincing her that she was
a child murderer who had indulged in acts of cannibalism or that she
might kill again if she did not feel guilty?"
I initially set up my mirror site
<http://pobox.com/~mbaker/mirror>
as my part in protecting freedom of speech on the Internet and as a
demonstration of the futility of trying to suppress information on the
Internet. However the report that your County Council is trying to
have disappear, is an important document in its own right that must be
available to family therapists, police departments, departments of
social welfare, and lawyers throughout the world. It is an important
historical document, especially in its tracing the spread of satanic
hysteria to sources in the United States.
More importantly the publication of the report may assist the forces
of reason in rejecting the evil that once infected the social workers
of Nottinghamshire. That is, after all, why one of its authors, who
is a social worker himself, felt that it should be published.
I am not, by the way, insensitive to your claim that: "Some of the
young persons named in the Report are the subject of deemed care
orders made in accordance with the provisions of the Children Act
1989. The Nottinghamshire County Council has Statutory and Common Law
obligations and duties to those young people. It is in acknowledgement
of those Statutory and other Common Law obligations and duties that
The Nottinghamshire County Council is taking the steps mentioned in
this letter." But I am afraid that I do not believe you. The report,
after all, has been carefully edited to hide the identity of the young
people who were the victims in this sordid affair. In any case, even
were I to try to suspend my disbelief the fact remains that I agree
with the authors of the report when they say: "we do not consider that
suspending disbelief should also mean a suspension of commonsense or
the use of critical faculties."
I shall therefore not comply with your demands.
Yours sincerely,
News.COM -
U.K.
child abuse witch-hunt exposed
Such publicity can not have been what you wanted. After all, no one
would have mirrored the Broxtowe report at their sites on the World
Wide Web had you not sought to prevent its original publication.
There are at least two dozen web sites where the report is mirrored,
not one of which would have existed if you had not sought to suppress
its original publication on the web. For those of us who are opposed
to governmental censorship of information on the World Wide Web, this
reaction is gratifying. I doubt that it is so for your County
Council.
Dr Michael Baker.
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