Last night I watched Deliberate Intent on TV. It started off as a sort of courtroom drama style thing, a type of film I quite like.
It was all based upon the 1st amendment and the survivors of a murdered family trying to sue the publishers of a book, for publishing what they said was an instruction manual on how to kill and get away with it. The lawyer for the plaintiff ends up being a very well known 1st amendment scholar, who truly beleives that the 1st amendment is right and therefore he seems to be defending something which he doens't beleive in...
To cut a long story short, they win... well they get given a date for the trial and the publisher settles out of court...
You get so many of these films 'that are based on true stories' that I decided to look up the publisher and the book... sure enough the publisher is real and the courtcase was real. The publisher stopped selling the book and destroyed the copies which it had.
There is a sort of irony that, because of the court case, some freedom of speech dude OCR'd a copy and posted it on the web, and now it's everywhere - for free and there's no real way of tracking who's had it or read it! I'm not posting any links to the book. But here's a link to the report from an appeal court case: Rice v. Paladin Enterprises (1997)
I've been reading it and it's made me feel quite ill...
The film made me think lots about what way the case should have gone... is publishing a book just publishing a book? I keep swaying... but think it probably is, and it's up to the person who reads it on whether they carry out the acts in it. If the person hadn't read the book the family would still have been killed somehow or another, such was the greed of the client.
Here's the dedication from the book... use it as you wish...
To Those Who Think,
To Those Who Dare,
To Those Who Do,
To Those Who Succeed.
Success is nothing more than taking advantage of an opportunity.
Anonymous
And again some irony in here... in my eyes the family were clearly just on a mission just to profit from sueing, and saw this as a great opportunity to make some money, money doesn't bring people back to life... would they have sued the manufacturer of the gun that was used to shoot their loved ones if the book hadn't been found?
All I need is some opportunities...