At the demand of the law firm DEMPSEY, ROBERTS & SMITH, LTD made to my Internet Service Provider, the article CSICOP and the Skeptics: An Overview originally published in the Vol. 86, January 1992 issue the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research has been temporarily removed pending withdrawal of the demand from DEMPSEY, ROBERTS & SMITH, LTD or the adjudication of the legal issues in a court of competent jurisdiction. The law firm mentioned has absolutely nothing to do with either the Society or the author, it was retained by a Mr. Drew Endacott over a problem he has with part of 1 paragraph of a 22 page article he believes relates to him..

My ISP has absolutely nothing to do with the page removal, given the alleged copyright infringement, it is legally required to remove access to the page, they have no choice in the matter.

The copyright issue is about content relating to a previous statement which the letter asserts was made by a Mr. Drew Endacott. Unfortunately, under the provisions of the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act (USC17SEC512) anybody with content on a site can demand to an Internet Service Provider that content allegedly breaching copyright be pulled and the ISP is required to comply until the user notifies the provider that he believes that the notice was in error and provides sufficient information to allow the party alleging infringement to locate him for the purpose of legal action. The letter also alleges that the content of the paragraph complained about was defamatory. (in general, statements about a person or organization have to be false to be considered defamatory)

In essense, it appears to me, based on my reading of the letter from the lawfirm, that the lawyer is claiming:

  1. that the client didn't commit the acts described in the article, and saying that he did them defames his character
  2. that Mr.Endacott is claiming copyright infringement over words in a letter quoted in the article, whose writing and sending is one of the acts which the lawyer is apparently asserting his client did not commit.

If this doesn't make sense to you, you read the above correctly.

Since I prefer to present uncensored documents, I removed the original page content. This may easily be found by entering the title of the article exactly as above enclosed in quotation marks as a search term at any of the larger search engines, I found it at Fast Search & Transfer in both html format and a PDF reproduction of the original article from microfilm. This also has been posted in the last year on Usenet, findable via DejaNews.