The Jehovah’s Witnesses Are Back Abusing Copyright Law To Unmask Their Critics. Again.

from the dmca-surveillance dept

EFF announced last week that it has stepped in to defend yet another anonymous Jehovah’s Witness critic from having their identity exposed through bogus copyright claims. The Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society — the organizational arm of the Jehovah’s Witnesses — has sent DMCA subpoenas to both Google and Cloudflare seeking information to unmask the anonymous operator of a website called JWS Library. If you’re getting a sense of déjà vu here, that’s because we’ve written about Watch Tower doing this exact thing more than once before, and they keep coming back to the same playbook.

EFF’s client, identified as J. Doe, is a current member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who got curious about the history of the organization’s public statements and how they’ve changed over time. So Doe did something pretty straightforwardly useful. As EFF explains:

They created research tools to analyze those documents and ultimately created a website, JWS Library, allowing others to use those tools and verify their findings through an archive that included documents suppressed by the church. Doe and others discovered prophecies that failed to come true, erasure of a leader’s disgrace, increased calls for obedience and donations, and other insights about the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ practices. Doe also used machine translation on a foreign-language document to help the community understand what the church was saying to different audiences and also to help understand potential changes in the organization’s attitudes towards dissent.

That’s about as clearly transformative and non-commercial as fair use gets — it’s for research and commentary, after all. But Watch Tower doesn’t care about whether the copyright claim is actually viable. It cares about finding out who Doe is. And everyone involved knows exactly why. Again EFF’s Kit Walsh explains:

Within the church, dissent or even asking questions has often been punished by labeling members as apostates and ostracizing—or “disfellowshipping”— them. As a result, Doe and others choose to speak anonymously to avoid retaliation that could cost them family, friend, and professional relationships.

Watch Tower knows all of this, of course. That’s precisely the point. They’re not sending DMCA subpoenas to Google and Cloudflare because they have a genuine interest in protecting their copyrights — they’re using the subpoena process as a surveillance tool with a built-in punishment mechanism waiting at the other end.

We know this because we’ve watched the pattern play out in extraordinary detail multiple times. When Paul Levy of Public Citizen’s Litigation Group dug into Watch Tower’s history back in 2022, he found that the organization had filed an astounding 72 copyright subpoenas since 2017. And how many of those subpoenas resulted in an actual copyright infringement lawsuit? Essentially zero. As Levy documented:

As can be seen from this list of Watch Tower copyright infringement lawsuits, Watch Tower has never used the information obtained from these subpoenas to file an infringement action. The only infringement lawsuit that Watch Tower has filed against the target of one of its DMCA subpoenas is a current case (discussed below) in which enforcement of the subpoena was denied!

So they file subpoena after subpoena claiming they need to identify alleged infringers to bring a lawsuit, and then they never bring the lawsuit. What they do with the information, as Levy uncovered, is identify critics and then initiate disfellowship proceedings against them. The copyright claim is just the crowbar they use to pry open the door.

The one time Watch Tower actually did file a lawsuit — against a critic using the pseudonym Kevin McFree — things went badly for them. Once a judge started paying close attention to what was actually going on, Watch Tower fled the case, dismissing with prejudice. Among the more remarkable moments in that case: Watch Tower’s counsel tried to claim the organization lacked “significant funds” to pursue litigation — despite Watch Tower’s publicly available tax filings showing it has more than a billion dollars in assets. The organization also tried to use the infringement lawsuit as a vehicle to investigate how McFree had obtained leaked unpublished videos — something that had nothing to do with copyright and everything to do with plugging leaks and identifying internal dissidents.

Which makes the history here so galling. The Jehovah’s Witnesses have one of the most impressive First Amendment track records of any organization in American legal history. Starting with Lovell v. City of Griffin in 1938, they brought a string of landmark cases establishing core free speech protections that benefit all of us today. They fought for the right to go door-to-door without identifying themselves, and against compelled speech. Watch Tower’s own in-house counsel, Paul Polidoro — the same lawyer who has been issuing many of these DMCA subpoenas — successfully argued before the Supreme Court for the right of Jehovah’s Witnesses to speak anonymously.

And now that same organization is systematically using copyright law’s cheapest, lowest-bar procedural tool to strip anonymity from its own members who dare to ask questions. As EFF puts it:

The First Amendment does not permit the unmasking of anonymous speakers based on such weak claims. Indeed, the First Amendment protects anonymous speakers precisely because some would be deterred from speaking if they faced retribution for doing so.

Watch Tower got caught doing this in 2019. They got caught again in 2022 and ran away from court once a judge saw through the scheme. And here they are in 2026, right back at it. There’s no honest way to treat these as isolated incidents — this is a deliberate, ongoing policy of abusing copyright as a weapon against internal dissent. The DMCA subpoena process — designed to be quick and cheap — is working exactly as Watch Tower wants: a low-cost intelligence-gathering operation that most targets can’t afford to fight.

EFF is pushing back, at least. But it shouldn’t require EFF — or, as in the last case, Paul Levy and Public Citizen Litigation Group — to show up every single time before a court will acknowledge that an organization with a billion dollars in assets and a decade-long pattern of filing subpoenas it never converts into actual lawsuits is abusing the process. At some point, courts should be able to connect these dots on their own.

Filed Under: copyfraud, copyright, dmca, fair use, jehovah’s witnesses

Companies: eff, watch tower bible and tract society