koreth

The paper (linked from the article) has a photo of the actual tablet in question, which was apparently discovered circa 1900.

I think this is a more subtle question than it appears on the surface, especially if you don’t think of it as a one-off.

Whether or not Scientology deserves to be called a “religion,” it’s a safe bet there will be new religions with varying levels of legitimacy popping up in the future. And chances are some of them will have core beliefs that are related to the technology of the day, because it would be weird if that weren’t the case. “Swords” and “plowshares” are technological artifacts, after all.

Leaving aside the specific case of Scientology, the question becomes, how do laws that apply to classes of technology interact with laws that treat religious practices as highly protected activities? We’ve seen this kind of question come up in the context of otherwise illegal drugs that are used in traditional rituals. But religious-tech questions seem like they could have a bunch of unique wrinkles.

The “developed or supplied outside the course of a commercial activity” condition is part of why people are up in arms about this. If I’m at work and I run into a bug and submit a patch, my patch was developed in the course of a commercial activity, and thus the project as a whole was partially developed in the course of a commercial activity.

How many major open-source projects have zero contributions from companies?

It also acts as a huge disincentive for companies to open their code at all. If I package up a useful library I wrote at work, and I release it, and some other person downloads it and exposes a vulnerability that is only exploitable if you use the library in a way that I wasn’t originally using it, boom, my company is penalized. My company’s lawyers would be insane to let me release any code given that risk.