Someone just posted download links to my journal. At least for a while, folks can still download the anti-Scientology film "The Bridge". Well, at least until the Scientologists take them down again.
This is, to the best of my knowledge, the only full-length movie about Scientology which they've not (yet) been able to suppress.
I started downloading before I left for work this morning, but it looked like it'd be a while. I suppose I'm just hogging up bandwidth somebody else could be using.
If I understand correctly, it's a creative commons license, so even if the copyright holder has now decided he doesn't want to distribute it, he can't legally stop other folks from doing so. Viewed in isolation, it irks me that a copyright holder would attempt to stop distribution of something he released under a free license. Of course, he apparently has extenuating circumstances.
I hope if I'm ever in such a situation I'll have the ability and the willingness to tell the bullies to give it all they've got, because I'm not going to try to control people by telling them not to distribute something I already gave them. But I'm not going to fault him for not doing so; I have no idea what the full circumstances are. And if and when I get there, I may change my mind.
Re:Downloading
Ovid on 2006-10-17T15:37:04
So if private investigators were to dig into your past, is there any chance that there's anything they could dig up which might be used to blackmail you? Or worse, is there something which wouldn't bother you, but which they could then hold against your friends and/or family, thus putting you into a bind?
I'm not saying that's what the Scientologists did, but it's a thought.
Those are rhetorical questions. You don't need to answer them since answering 'yes' might raise a couple of eyebrows
:) Re:Downloading
jdavidb on 2006-10-17T15:57:14
Answer to the first question is, not really. In general I try to live in such a way that not too many of my "secrets" matter. Interestingly enough just yesterday I saw a friend of mine espousing the same kind of thinking on slashdot, even though we've never conversed on the subject and he takes it to quite an extreme beyond me.
Whenever I see a movie or a TV show about blackmail, I tend to respond with a gut feeling of, "You should just tell the blackmailer to do his worst, prepare yourself for the revelation of the horrible secret, and make sure you take the blackmailer down with you." It's sort of a "don't negotiate with terrorists" style of thinking.
Like I said, I'm not in such a situation. I can't say for sure how I'd act. But I try to live in such a way that having my secrets revealed wouldn't be catastrophic. Are there things I'd be upset about having revealed? Certainly. I'm not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But I try to be mentally prepared for the possibility that any part of my private life might somehow come out.
Of course, your point about other family members having such issues is well-taken. It'd be a mess to get into that on your own; it'd be really bad to have it happen with other people in the balance.
Like I said, I don't fault anyone involved. I just tend to think I'd want to do differently.
A copy of the film hosted on Google Video is linked from XenuTV. The same copy is linked from Scientomogy, which has a bunch of additional, but mostly dead, links. However, there are plenty more copies on Google Video, and it’s all over the BitTorrent networks, so it isn’t hard to come by. Google’s top-most hits for ["The Bridge" scientology] are Scientology sites, but the rest of the results page is all pages about the movie.
It seems pretty clear that all they will ever manage is to reduce the convenience of getting the film.
