Brian Flemming has a nice summary of Creationist/felon Kent Hovind’s attack on the Rational Response Squad and anyone who speaks badly of him:
The facts as I’m able to determine them:
1. Kent Hovind, an evangelist for the crackpot Bible-based pseudoscience called creationism, distributes many videos advocating his position.
2. Hovind repeatedly and explicitly states that his videos “are not copyrighted” and encourages free distribution of them.
3. Critics of Hovind use his videos in a quotation context to build their arguments against his position; this usage of Hovind’s work is doubly protected free speech — as fair use (comment and criticism) as well as by Hovind’s own release of copyright in his work.
4. A few days ago, Hovind starts filing copyright-based complaints against his critics who use his videos in their works. He demands that YouTube take the videos down.
5. YouTube responds, Yes, sir! How high? Entire YouTube accounts –including scores of videos containing no disputed content whatsoever — are immediately shut down because of YouTube’s policy of responding like an enraged psychotic schoolgirl to any complaint that contains the word “copyright.”
A little more of the story:
[Hovind’s] organisation, Creation Science Evangelism Ministries, have produced many anti-evolution videos and unleashed them upon the world without copyright restrictions. All very good for propagating their Biblical message – until, that is, some bright graduate students going by the name of Extant Dodo Productions had the idea of editing them to insert rebuttals of each mendacious argument as it arose, and posted them on YouTube.
CSEM starting sending out threatening letters to Extant Dodo, and forcing YouTube to take down the critical videos by claiming the copyright that they had explicitly given away. Unsurprisingly, the no-copyright disclaimer has just recently disappeared from the CSEM website.
One more summary from RRS:
By now, you should be sufficiently pissed off.
Hovind is trying to prove his point by suppressing any criticism. It just makes him look weak. He’s not willing to answer the criticism, so he’ll try to suppress it. It’s the only hope Creationists have.
[tags]atheist, atheism, RRS[/tags]
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