Karin Spaink | |
|---|---|
 Spaink named Freethinker of the Year 2015. | |
| Born | 20 December 1957 (age 66) |
| Occupation(s) | Journalist, writer |
Karin Spaink (born 20 December 1957) is a Dutch journalist, writer and feminist. She is also a free speech advocate and social critic, who has criticized New Age writers and the Church of Scientology.
Spaink was born in Amsterdam and trained as a secondary school teacher from 1975 to 1981, specialising in English. From 1981 to 1984 she studied sociology at the University of Amsterdam, She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1986.
In 1986 and 1987 she trained as a computer programmer, at Volmac and Fokker. In this period she worked for the Pacifist Socialist Party. From 1988 until 1990 she worked for Fokker. In 2018 she became the editor-in-chief of Follow the Money. [1] She wrote a regular column for Het Parool (1992 to 2022) [2] and previously wrote for De Groene Amsterdammer (1994-2003). [3]
From 2001 to 2004 she was an external adviser for the Freedom of the Media bureau (FOM) of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), advising them on freedom of speech and the internet. [4]
In 2005 she became the chief editor of a new book series, The Next Ten Years. [5] The first book in the series, which dealt with electronic patient records (EPR) and the accompanying hack of two major hospitals, led to a debate in parliament. A few months later, the national introduction of EPR's was stalled by the Department of Health, citing Spaink's research. In that same year, she embarked on writing the history of XS4ALL and Hack-Tic .
In 2013 she joined the Committee of Recommendation of the Dutch whistleblower foundation Publeaks, [6] which on 9 September 2013 launched a whistleblowing initiative based on GlobaLeaks software. [7]
In 2015, Spaink was named Freethinker of the Year by De Vrije Gedachte. [8]
Spaink gave the 2018 Mosse Lecture, titled Tussen Grewel en Fortuyn: Identiteit, herzuiling, privilege en verschil (Between Grewel and Fortuyn: Identity, re-pillarification, privilege and difference). [9]
Spaink is a free speech advocate and social critic. Some of her subjects are:
Spaink first came into the national limelight by accusing such New Age writers as Louise Hay and Bernie Siegel of oversimplifying physical ailments by reducing them to a purely psychological phenomenon. [14] Suffering from multiple sclerosis, she was insulted by the suggestion that her disease was nothing more than the result of her own lack of willingness to heal. (Compare Idealism with Materialism; see also New Thought Movement.)
Her essay Het strafbare lichaam ("The Penal Body") coined neologisms such as kwakdenken ("quack thinking") and orenmaffia ("mind mob") that even made it into the Dutch language dictionary. The latter term derived from the expression that something is "all between the ears," in other words, "all in the mind."
In 1995, the Church of Scientology began a legal campaign to remove what it asserted were copyright infringements and trade secrets from the Internet. [15] : 153 Karin Spaink was one of many to put up pages containing the Fishman Affidavit in criticism of the church, and Scientology responded by suing Spaink, internet service provider XS4ALL, and 20 other ISPs in the Netherlands for copyright infringement, raiding the offices of XS4ALL to seize servers. [16] 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.[ citation needed ]
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.[ citation needed ]
The hearing on the merits made compromises: the court in 1999 found that service providers do have a responsibility for documents that users put up on their web site. [17] However, any claims that Karin Spaink was breaking the church's copyright were deemed unfounded, [17] 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.[ citation needed ]
Court costs were divided equally between parties. In the Netherlands these usually run into (only) thousands of guilders; 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 lawsuits brought on by the church is not making use of a legal right, but a form of harassment (barratry).[ citation needed ]
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. [18] [19] 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 cases where the quotation serves a higher goal. The court held it proven that Scientology is an organisation that tries to undermine democracy, [20] and ruled that Spaink had the right to quote the Church in her exposé.
The Church appealed again, 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. [21] 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. [16] The verdict of the appeal court stands, but the Supreme Court did not add an evaluation of its own. [22]
Spaink has continued to criticize Scientology, and actively participates in Project Chanology's monthly pickets against the organization. [23]
In the original court case, the judge upheld the law that ISPs 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 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 In the verdict of the appeal on 4 September 2003, this ruling was reversed. [18] [19]
Spaink is also involved in the Right to Die movement; she hosts a website which offers access to information concerning methods of suicide. This website garnered much controversy when, in October 2005, Christopher Aston (25) and Maria Williams (42) from Liverpool and London respectively, entered into a suicide pact after meeting on a newsgroup discussing the same subject. [24]
Xenu, also called Xemu, is a figure in the Church of Scientology's secret "Advanced Technology", a sacred and esoteric teaching. According to the "Technology", Xenu was the extraterrestrial ruler of a "Galactic Confederacy" who brought billions of his people to Earth in DC-8-like spacecraft 75 million years ago, stacked them around volcanoes, and killed them with hydrogen bombs. Official Scientology scriptures hold that the thetans of these aliens adhere to humans, causing spiritual harm.
There are a number of disputes concerning the Church of Scientology's attempts to suppress material critical of Scientology and the organization on the Internet, utilizing various methods – primarily lawsuits and legal threats, as well as front organizations. In late 1994, the organization began using various legal tactics to stop distribution of unpublished documents written by L. Ron Hubbard. The organization has often been accused of barratry through the filing of SLAPP suits. The organization's response is that its litigious nature is solely to protect its copyrighted works and the unpublished status of certain documents.
The Penet remailer was a pseudonymous remailer operated by Johan "Julf" Helsingius of Finland from 1993 to 1996. Its initial creation stemmed from an argument in a Finnish newsgroup over whether people should be required to tie their real name to their online communications. Julf believed that people should not—indeed, could not—be required to do so. In his own words:
The Church of Scientology has been involved in numerous court disputes across the world. In some cases, when the Church has initiated the dispute, questions have been raised as to its motives. The Church of Scientology says that its use of the legal system is necessary to protect its intellectual property and its right to freedom of religion. Critics say that most of the organization's legal claims are designed to harass those who criticize it and its manipulative business practices.
XS4ALL was an Internet service provider (ISP) in the Netherlands. It was founded in 1993 as an offshoot of the hackers club Hack-Tic by Felipe Rodriquez, Rop Gonggrijp, Paul Jongsma and Cor Bosman, while based in Amsterdam. It was the sixth provider in the Netherlands and the second company to offer Internet access to private individuals. Initially only offering dial-in services via modem and ISDN, it later expanded to offer dial-up access as well as ADSL, VDSL, and fiber-optic (FTTH) services as well as mobile internet. The name is a play on the English pronunciation of access for all.
The Fishman Affidavit is a set of court documents submitted by self-professed ex-Scientologist Steven Fishman in 1993 in the federal case, Church of Scientology International v. Fishman and Geertz (Case No. CV 91-6426.
Arnaldo Pagliarini Lerma was an American writer and activist, a former Scientologist, and a critic of the Church of Scientology who appeared in television, media and radio interviews. Lerma was the first person to post the court document known as the Fishman Affidavit, including the Xenu story, to the Internet via the Usenet newsgroup alt.religion.scientology.
OT VIII or OT 8 is the highest current auditing level in Scientology. OT VIII is known as "The Truth Revealed" and was first released to select high-ranking public Scientologists in 1988, two years after the death of Scientology's founder, L. Ron Hubbard. OT VIII is only delivered to members of the Church of Scientology in one place—aboard the organization's private cruise ship, the Freewinds, and is additionally available from independent Scientology groups. There are a few advanced auditors that are able to deliver the level to those who meet the prerequisites.
According to the beliefs of the Church of Scientology, the Marcab Confederacy is said to be one of the most powerful galactic civilizations still active. Church founder L. Ron Hubbard describes it as:
Various planets united into a very vast civilization which has come forward up through the last 200,000 years, formed out of the fragments of earlier civilizations. In the last 10,000 years they have gone on with a sort of decadent kicked-in-the-head civilization that contains automobiles, business suits, fedora hats, telephones, spaceships — a civilization which looks almost an exact duplicate but is worse off than the current US civilization.
File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia, program files, documents or electronic books/magazines. It involves various legal aspects as it is often used to exchange data that is copyrighted or licensed.
According to research done by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Netherlands is ranked with Switzerland in having the most broadband subscriptions per 100 inhabitants, has no bandwidth caps, and has the most homes passed in Europe in terms of connection speeds of 50 Mbit/s and higher.
Karin Pouw is a French-born American official within the Church of Scientology International. Since 1993, she has held the position of Director of Public Affairs in the Office of Special Affairs (OSA) and serves as one of Scientology's international spokespersons.
The Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act (OCILLA) is United States federal law that creates a conditional 'safe harbor' for online service providers (OSP), a group which includes Internet service providers (ISP) and other Internet intermediaries, by shielding them for their own acts of direct copyright infringement as well as shielding them from potential secondary liability for the infringing acts of others. OCILLA was passed as a part of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and is sometimes referred to as the "Safe Harbor" provision or as "DMCA 512" because it added Section 512 to Title 17 of the United States Code. By exempting Internet intermediaries from copyright infringement liability provided they follow certain rules, OCILLA attempts to strike a balance between the competing interests of copyright owners and digital users.
Operation Clambake, also referred to by its domain name, xenu.net, is a website and Norway-based non-profit organization, launched in 1996, founded by Andreas Heldal-Lund, that publishes criticism of the Church of Scientology. It is owned and maintained by Andreas Heldal-Lund, who stated that he supported the rights of all people to practice Scientology or any religion. Operation Clambake has referred to the Church of Scientology as "a vicious and dangerous cult that masquerades as a religion". The website includes texts of petitions, news articles, exposés, and primary source documents. The site has been ranked as high as the second spot in Google searches for the term "Scientology".
Mohammed Benzakour is a Moroccan-Dutch columnist, essayist, poet, writer and politician. He is the third child in a family of five. At age three, he and mother and siblings settle in Zwijndrecht, Netherlands, where his father worked. He graduated from high school at vwo level and studied sociology at Leiden University and later political science and moved to Rotterdam to finish his master. Meanwhile, he joined the Labour Party. He started his journalism career working for De Volkskrant and also published in NRC Handelsblad, De Groene Amsterdammer and Vrij Nederland. He received the ASN Media Prize in 1999 and the Silver Zebra in 2001 for insights in a 'society in motion'. He later published two books, Abou Jahjah: Nieuwlichter of Oplichter. De demonisering van een politiek rebel in 2004 and Osama's Grot, Allah, Holland en ik, a compilation of his columns, articles and essays from 2001 until 2005, the year of publication. In that same year he also won the Peace Prize for Journalism. In 2008 his 'Stinkende Heelmeesters' was published, a compilation of essays, reviews, columns and reports from 2001 to 2008.
This is a list on countries where at least one internet service provider (ISP) formerly or currently censors the popular file sharing website The Pirate Bay (TPB).
Karin Amatmoekrim is a Surinamese writer. She has written five novels and won the 2009 Black Magic Woman Literature Prize for Titus.
The Foundation George Mosse Fund of the University of Amsterdam is a Dutch foundation (stichting) that aims to promote gay and lesbian studies. It was founded in 2001 at the University of Amsterdam, with a bequest from George Mosse's inheritance, given out of appreciation for the cultural-historical education and research on homosexuality in Amsterdam. The foundation is known primarily for its Mosse Lectures and its QueerTalk events.
Eva Hartog is a Dutch journalist and contributor to De Groene Amsterdammer and Politico Europe. She joined the English language Moscow-based newspaper, The Moscow Times, in 2013 at the age of 25 going on to serve as the publication's editor in chief between 2017 and 2019.
The Church of Scientology has been active in the Netherlands since 1972, opening its first church in Amsterdam in 1974.
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