From: henri <henri@nowhere.com>
Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology
Subject: Peter Letterese suit claiming ownership of "Big League Sales" materials
Date: Sun, 07 Nov 2004 15:41:04 -0500
Message-ID: <k81to0hd4t64jckvle9voaoplqsaiqr5lr@4ax.com>
http://buttersquash.net/archives/letterese.pdf
This is the entirety of Peter Letterese's copyright lawsuit
against WISE, Church of Scientology International, et al.
It is a copyright lawsuit.
It names "Does 1-3200," almost invariably a giveaway of a lawsuit
filed by a lunatic.  There is a series of diagrams at the end indicating
it may have been massively served on every corporate entity remotely
related to Scientology a la Barbara Schwarz.
However, Letterese claims copyright to the Big League Sales
book, upon which many of Scientology's sales techniques are
based, and upon this claim bases claims that Scientology is
infringing on copyrights owned by him.  He claims this book 
has gone through other incarnations and is currently entitled
Integrity Intact. . .The Technology of Selling.  I have not analyzed
these factual allegations and have no idea whether or not 
Letterese's claims are true, except as specifically noted in this
post.
Letterese claims to have purchased the rights to this closing
techniques material from Les Dane's widow.  He attaches an
exhibit purporting to be a copyright registration indicating ownership
of the material.  If that document is legitimate, it seems Letterese
really does own the material.  The question then becomes whether
he actually can stop Scientology from creating derivative works
or continuing to use derivative works created at a previous time.
I don't know whether Scientology ever entered into an agreement
with Les Dane's people about the Big League Sales material, but
I do know that material plays a significant role in Scientology and
WISE sales training.
I just realized when looking at the complaint it that Exhibit H includes
what seems like it may be an entire WISE course pack.  I have omitted the 
part of this exhibit which probably constitutes an infringement.  The rest
is a table comparing the contents of the course pack to the Les Danes
materials.
There are some other duplications of copyrighted material, such
as brief printouts from webpages, which I do not consider 
infringing in this context.
Another exhibit is a table with comparisons of text from the 
Scientology materials and the Les Dane materials.
I have no idea whether these claims have any legal merit, but
if Letterese's documentation is legitimate, he appears to have
demonstrated he has rights to the Les Dane materials, it's 
common knowledge that Scientology has based a lot of its
own sales materials on the Les Dane materials, and there do
appear to be similar passages in both sets of materials.

Note by editor: it is all a bit fussy. When you visit to the US copyright office and enter Registration Number: RE-797-552 -- you'll get the original Les Dane registration. When you enter TXu-722-831 as Registration Number you'll get the Peter Letterese & Associates, Inc. registration with as "Previous Related Version: Appl. states Surefire sales closing techniques & Big league sales closing techniques by Les Dane are preexisting material."

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