scrtachme: If he is violating the law...
"IF" is the key word here.
The org waves their "copyright" around whenever they feel threatened but as far as I know, nobody has challenged them in court over their use of copyright as a censorship tool.
Law and legalities can and are challenged in court all the time.
This issue has never made it into the court system
I would like to see it go to court sometime. There are lawyers who believe that there is a sound argument for a secretive religion's literature being made public and distributed without commentary and without any changes whatsoever.
from:
Gutenberg's Legacy: Copyright, Censorship, and Religious Pluralism
https://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1378&context=californialawreview
As one might expect, copying another's expression in its entirety usually weighs against fair use; however, the fundamental question is whether "the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole" are reasonable in relation to the purpose of copying. Thus, in some circumstances, fair use may apply even when the defendant has copied the entire work, while in others it may not apply if the portion copied, though relatively small, constitutes the "heart" of the work.
Much has happened concerning copyrights since the above article was published in 2003, but this was the author's conclusion to his informative article on religious copyright:
History often repeats itself. Although both copyright law and freedom of religion have made considerable progress since the era of the Stationers' Company, when the Crown conferred the exclusive right to copy expressly for the purpose of promoting censorship, cases still arise in which copyright can serve to silence dissenting views. I have argued above that courts should discourage this misuse of copyright, and that respect for the beliefs of minority religions and of religious dissenters should inform the courts' analysis of several copyright issues. More specifically, when copyright plaintiffs claim that God or another supernatural being has authored the work in question, a commitment to religious accommodation and the doctrine of copyright estoppel counsels in favor of taking these plaintiffs at their word, without passing judgment on the truth or falsity of the claim. Moreover, in some contexts the merger doctrine should limit the assertion of copyright in religious texts, although courts must be careful to avoid creating a significant disincentive to the publication of these works.
Second, while the application of generally applicable copyright law does not violate the Free Exercise Clause, a respect for religious diversity suggests that courts should be more sensitive in their application of the fair-use doctrine to believers' needs to copy, adapt, and distribute religious works. Specifically, courts should be wary of copyright owners' assertion of copyright rights as a potential means of suppressing or inhibiting religious dissent. At the same time, this counsel hardly suggests that most uses of religious works should be exempted under fair use, and it leaves open the possibility that some uses should be regulated under a liability rule instead of under the more common property-rule regime.
Copyright law is not cut and dry, especially when it is applied to religious texts.
It is premature to say that the owner of the website avoidjw.og is violating the law. That has not been established.
