Two left-libertarian organizations, the Center for a Stateless Society and Students for a Stateless Society, are fending off a bigot who believes his critics don't have a right to quote his words while criticizing him. Roderick Long, a senior fellow at the center (and occasional contributor to Reason), has the details:
Center for a Stateless Society
The Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) has an associated student group, Students for a Stateless Society (S4SS), with affiliates around the world. A couple of weeks ago, S4SS noticed that its affiliate at the University of Ghent in Belgium (S4SS UGent) was being taken over by racists and Islamophobic bigots, so it issued a public statement disaffiliating with the group, and explained why. The explanation included quotations from bigoted comments made on the S4SS UGent facebook page – a page that was public at the time, though it has since been made private. C4SS then put up a link to the S4SSstatement.
One of the racists quoted in the statement, a certain Olivier Janssens, demanded that the notice be taken down, alleging that a) his comments were copyrighted and shouldn't be quoted without his consent, and b) his privacy was violated, and personal safety threatened, since we had made public his comments from a private forum. Since we judged that explaining the disaffiliation, and warning potential comrades against Janssens and his entryist colleagues, created a fair-use context for the quotations – and since, contrary to Janssens's assertions, the forum in which the comments were made was actually public at the time he made them – we declined his request (with some asperity).
Long goes on to reprint the post that got the two websites in trouble. Among other things, it quotes one of Janssens' cronies calling for "Guns to kill all those sand-niggers and their servants…just like the animals they are." You can see why S4SS would want to distance themselves from this crew.
The Center for a Stateless Society -- which never even posted Janssens' words but got hit by his spurious copyright claim anyway -- has put up a backup site; its front page currently quotes the takedown notice. (An actual line from Janssens' attorney: "Your hosting customer…decided to embarrass Oliver Janssens in the worst and most effective way – by words out of his own mouth." Well, yeah.) It also includes a request for financial assistance. The Students for a Stateless Society page is still down.
Update: Janssens has withdrawn his takedown demand and the two censored sites are claiming victory. For more details, go here.
