Scientology Celebrity Centre *
Photo: Kevork Djansezian * The Church of Scientology was founded in the early 1950s by pulp science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, and it's been run by his successor, David Miscavige, since 1987. But for the past year or so the public face of Scientology has been a man named Tommy Davis. Son of Hollywood actress (and longtime Scientologist) Anne Archer, Davis has a stylish mop coif and boyish (not to say Tom Cruise-ish) good looks that have been put before the media's cameras every time the media has come around to ask Scientology why people are saying such unkind things about it— which lately has happened with some regularity. From the South Park episode that so offended Scientologist Isaac Hayes that he quit his role on the show (as the voice of beloved regular character Chef) to the death of John Travolta's teenage son, Jett, blamed by some Scientology critics on the church's distrust of establishment medical science, Davis has had his work cut out for him, and it shows.
Sitting down for an 8 am interview at the Celebrity Centre, a grand Hollywood chateau where Scientology's rich and famous go for white-glove treatment, Davis looks tired. The topic of discussion is Anonymous, the leaderless swarm of online troublemakers who launched a months-long anti-Scientology campaign after the church tried to erase a controversial Tom Cruise video from the Web. Davis has come prepared with hours' worth of talking points. Anonymous, he says, are terrorists, vandals, the digital equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan, and dupes of the church's fanatic longtime enemies. But in some ways, his key accusation is that they had the whole thing wrong from the start: There was nothing remotely improper, he insists, in Scientology's attempts to get the leaked Cruise video taken down. "We issue[d] a standard boilerplate copyright notice, which is the most normal thing in the world," Davis says. "Every content owner on the planet issues them on a daily basis... whether it's Universal Music Group or movie studios or any entity that has intellectual properties."
But it turns out, curiously, that one of the most illuminating things you can know about Scientology is this: Its relationship to intellectual property is not quite your typical copyright holder's— let alone your typical religion's. Granted, spiritual traditions have always been great generators of what we nowadays call content (the Bible was the first best-seller and remains the biggest), but it's hard to think of any that has made both the legal fact and the economic logic of intellectual property as central to its doctrine as Scientology does.
To be a practicing Scientologist is to rely, at every step of a long, steep climb to enlightenment, on paid access to some piece or another of the church's copyright-protected "tech"— the several million words of instruction left behind by L. Ron Hubbard not only in heavily marketed self-help books like Dianetics and Scientology: The Fundamentals of Thought, but in secret texts revealed only at the highest and most expensive levels of progression. "Scientology and Dianetics are technologies that work if applied exactly," says the church-produced handbook What Is Scientology? "If they are altered, the results will not be uniform. For this reason, the writings of the Church are protected by copyright and the words and symbols which represent the technology are protected by trademarks."
For Scientologists, in other words, enforcing the church's intellectual property rights isn't just a business practice, it's an article of faith. And it's this curious distinction that— years before Metallica's Lars Ulrich shook his fist at Napster or the MPAA's Jack Valenti battled online prescreener leaks— made Scientology the Internet's first copyright-wielding nemesis. In the mid-1990s, when Scientology critics gathered on Usenet to post secret church documents revealing the church's space-operatic Xenu cosmology, the church responded by invoking copyright to litigate its opponents into silence. When the critics started using the famous penet.fi public anonymizing server in Finland to hide their identities as they went on leaking documents, Scientology's legal team extended its long arm all the way to Helsinki to have the server subpoenaed and effectively shut down.
In short, the church was already doing battle with "anonymous" even before there was exactly such a thing.
Main article The Assclown Offensive: How to Enrage the Church of Scientology
