{"id":2461,"date":"2005-09-13T08:32:16","date_gmt":"2005-09-13T08:32:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/speaking-of-copyrights.html"},"modified":"2005-09-13T08:32:16","modified_gmt":"2005-09-13T08:32:16","slug":"speaking-of-copyrights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/speaking-of-copyrights.html","title":{"rendered":"Speaking of copyrights"},"content":{"rendered":"

A guy who runs a website which contains not much more than quotes from Jehovah’s Witnesses materials is being sued by the church:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Legal proceedings before the Ontario Superior Court were initiated on September 8, 2005 by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania (hereinafter WTBTS), the legal corporation used by Jehovah’s Witnesses for their publishing operations, against Peter Mosier, owner and operator of the website located at http:\/\/quotes.watchtower.ca<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The law suit seeks monetary punitive damages and a court ordered silencing of the aforementioned website, which does nothing more than provide a well researched and topically organized collection of interesting and esoteric quotations from more than one hundred years of religious literature published by Jehovah’s Witnesses. Why would WTBTS leadership want to shut down a web site that did nothing more than quote from their own religious literature? <\/p>\n

The very nature of these quotations is embarrassing to them, as they surprisingly admit in their court filing under paragraph 31, "The Defendant’s main purpose in operating the website is\u2026 to try to embarrass the Plaintiffs by quoting selectively from some of the Religious Works\u2026" <\/p>\n

From their own printed words the web site documents years of their failed prophecies, constantly changing Bible chronology, flip-flopping doctrinal changes, bizarre medical advice, and dogmatic teachings that many consider physically and emotionally harmful. Also included are Witness quotations demonizing the Internet, the Media, the United Nations, and other non-Witness entities as ‘tools of the Devil.’ Obviously, the WTBTS would rather these embarrassing writings be quietly ignored or entirely forgotten, and they are willing to resort to legal action to make it so. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Here’s the website<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A guy who runs a website which contains not much more than quotes from Jehovah’s Witnesses materials is being sued by the church: Legal proceedings before the Ontario Superior Court were initiated on September 8, 2005 by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania (hereinafter WTBTS), the legal corporation used by Jehovah’s Witnesses…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nSpeaking of copyrights - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/speaking-of-copyrights.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Speaking of copyrights - 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2461\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}