James J. Lippard [...] Jeffrey Parnell Frontier Corporation [...] Rochester, NY 14646 30 June 1999 Dear Mr. Parnell: I am in receipt of the "Alleged Copyright Violation Notice" from Kimberly Ferris dated June 29, 1999. This letter is a counter-notice under the provisions of 17 USC 512 (g), with the proviso that in fact no material has actually been removed by Frontier GlobalCenter, nor could have been. The allegedly infringing material which was accessible at the web address http://www.discord.org/img1.pl is no longer accessible at this address. I would like to point out, however, that no infringing material could be removed by Frontier GlobalCenter because no infringing material was ever located on this server, and this server is not owned by or accessible by Frontier GlobalCenter. The server is located in my home, and is a machine which I personally own. I have voluntarily modified the configuration of my server so that the above address now redirects to a different web site, one which is not owned or controlled by the Church of Scientology/Religious Technology Center. The above address was set up on my server to proxy the execution of a Perl CGI script (executable program) from the Church of Scientology's servers, namely, http://www.scientology.org/cgi-bin/img1.pl What this means is that any attempt to access the allegedly infringing location simply resulted in my machine forwarding the user's request to the program on Scientology's server, and forwarding responses (in this case, the program sends back an image) to the user who requested it, without ever storing a copy of either the script or any data it produced on my server. The effect is exactly the same as if the user specified the location on Scientology's server directly, except that the data passes through my machine in the process--just as it passes through the proxy servers run by AOL when AOL's users access any web page on the Internet, or in similar setups used by numerous other ISPs, by "anonymizing" web server proxies, by the "Junkbusters" web proxy that some Internet users use to avoid seeing web banner advertisements, and by any Internet user whose web requests are proxied by a firewall. It is quite possible that the only persons (aside from myself and representatives of Frontier's Legal department) who have ever actually made use of my server's proxy configuration to execute the img1.pl script are representatives of the Church of Scientology--it was hardly ever accessed (perhaps 30 times since August 1998), and my records show at least 16 accesses from the Church of Scientology since May 1999. To the best of my knowledge, there have never been any links to the web address http://www.discord.org/img1.pl on any web site; in fact, the only known public reference to this address between the time it was set up until yesterday, and from which the Church of Scientology must have obtained their knowledge of it, was in a Usenet posting to the alt.religion.scientology newsgroup dated August 24, 1998. As that posting gives complete detail of how the web proxy was set up, the Church of Scientology must have known that no infringing material was located on my server. Any representation they may have made to you that there was infringing material located on my server was false. It is my good faith belief that any removal of or disabling of access to material on my web server by Frontier GlobalCenter (had it occurred) would have been by mistake, based on the faulty assumption that infringing material resided on my server. Although I have no intention of reconfiguring my web server to again proxy the image from Scientology's web server, I consent to the jurisdiction of the U.S. Federal District Court (Southern District) in Arizona if necessary to resolve any dispute about the web proxying of the img1.pl script which is no longer in place as of yesterday. I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct. Executed on 30 June 1999. James J. Lippard cc: Kimberly A. Ferris