Scientology's latest embarrassment: Opposing 'right to repair' legislation

You may be seeing stories pop up from news outlets that don’t normally talk about Scientology today.

Why? Because Scientology put a letter on the record opposing the right to repair movement, which wants legislation that will allow consumers to repair things like automobiles and computers that can run into restrictions placed by manufacturers.

A letter from ASI attorney Ryland Hawkins was delivered to the US Copyright Office asking for exemptions to consumer products that require training to use.

This sent journalists scrambling. What is ASI and why does it have L. Ron Hubbard’s name on the letterhead?

In Scientology’s corporate restructuring in the early 1980s, creating a confusing alphabet soup of entities was part of the point, we’ve been told by former executives who took part in it. “Author Services Inc.” was ostensibly the literary agency for Hubbard’s works, but it is run by Sea Org officers and answers to David Miscavige. There’s simply no question that a letter from an attorney for ASI is a statement from Scientology itself.

And those journalists also sussed out that Scientology’s beef is about how new legislation might affect its latest “E-meter,” which the church believes houses proprietary software it doesn’t want anyone getting into. (At $5,000 each, the devices measure skin galvanism and contain about $100 worth of electronics inside.)

We thought you’d want to see the letter that ASI submitted to the Copyright Office. Here it is…

“It’s a totally unreasonable proposal,” iFixit’s Elizabeth Chamberlain told Ars Technica, which sounds like Scientology.

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Source Code: Actual things founder L. Ron Hubbard said on this date in history

Avast, Ye Mateys: Snapshots from Scientology’s years at sea

Overheard in the Freezone: Indie Hubbardism, one thought at a time

Past is Prologue: From this week in history at alt.religion.scientology

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