Karin Spaink

Karin Spaink (born 20 December 1957 in Amsterdam) is a journalist, writer and feminist.

Spaink is a free speech advocate and social critic.

Some of her subjects are:

Spaink was born in Amsterdam and trained as a secondary school teacher from 1975 to 1981, specialising in English.

From 1981 to 1984 she studied sociology at the University of Amsterdam, She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1986.

In 1986 and 1987 she trained as a computer programmer, at Volmac and Fokker.

In this period she worked for the Pacifist Socialist Party.

From 1988 until 1990 she worked for Fokker.

She wrote a regular column for Het Parool (1992 to 2022) and previously wrote for De Groene Amsterdammer (1994-2003).

In 1995, the Church of Scientology began a legal campaign to remove what it asserted were copyright infringements and trade secrets from the Internet.

Karin Spaink was one of many to put up pages containing the Fishman Affidavit in criticism of the church, and Scientology responded by suing Spaink, internet service provider XS4ALL, and 20 other ISPs in the Netherlands for copyright infringement, raiding the offices of XS4ALL to seize servers.

Part of the Fishman Affidavit were documents that Fishman had asserted to be the official teachings of Scientology.

The defendants responded by challenging the church to prove it was actually the copyright holder of the disputed documents.

The church allowed a Dutch notary to compare the church-copyrighted documents with the texts on Spaink's homepage.

Through her lawyers, Karin Spaink received a copy and started rewriting her homepage, just a week away from the court date for handling the motion for summary judgement.

Spaink replaced the contested documents with an analysis of the documents, quoting liberally, but not too liberally from them; Dutch copyright law does not have a fair-use provision, but allows quotation for purposes of scientific dissemination.

A representative of the Church of Scientology used this occurrence to back up an assertion that the church had won the court case.

The hearing on the merits made compromises: the court in 1999 found that service providers do have a responsibility for documents that users put up on their web site.

However, any claims that Karin Spaink was breaking the church's copyright were deemed unfounded, because Spaink had reworked her homepage as soon as she had discovered that the church indeed had valid claims to portions of the documents on that homepage.

This implicitly meant that the scholarly study of the church's documents on Spaink's homepage was in fact legal according to the decision.

Court costs were divided equally between parties.

In the Netherlands these usually run into (only) thousands of guilders; contrast this with the hundreds of thousands of dollars that American Scientology adversaries had to pay after losing their own, US-based court cases.

This may be an indication of why Spaink can still fight the church, and why it is claimed by Scientology critics that the barrage of lawsuits brought on by the church is not making use of a legal right, but a form of harassment (barratry).

The Church of Scientology appealed this decision.

From 2001 to 2004 she was an external adviser for the Freedom of the Media bureau (FOM) of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), advising them on freedom of speech and the internet.

A court date was originally planned for September 2002, but was postponed several times.

Finally in September 2003, the court decided in favor of Spaink and the internet service providers on all points.

In 2005 she became the chief editor of a new book series, The Next Ten Years.

The first book in the series, which dealt with electronic patient records (EPR) and the accompanying hack of two major hospitals, led to a debate in parliament.

A few months later, the national introduction of EPR's was stalled by the Department of Health, citing Spaink's research.

In that same year, she embarked on writing the history of XS4ALL and Hack-Tic.

In 2013 she joined the Committee of Recommendation of the Dutch whistleblower foundation Publeaks, which on 9 September 2013 launched a whistleblowing initiative based on GlobaLeaks software.

In 2015, Spaink was named Freethinker of the Year by De Vrije Gedachte.

In 2018 she became the editor-in-chief of Follow the Money.

Spaink gave the 2018 Mosse Lecture, titled Tussen Grewel en Fortuyn: Identiteit, herzuiling, privilege en verschil (Between Grewel and Fortuyn: Identity, re-pillarification, privilege and difference).

Spaink first came into the national limelight by accusing such New Age writers as Louise Hay and Bernie Siegel of oversimplifying physical ailments by reducing them to a purely psychological phenomenon.

Suffering from multiple sclerosis, she was insulted by the suggestion that her disease was nothing more than the result of her own lack of willingness to heal.

(Compare Idealism with Materialism; see also New Thought Movement.)

Her essay Het strafbare lichaam ("The Penal Body") coined neologisms such as kwakdenken ("quack thinking") and orenmaffia ("mind mob") that even made it into the Dutch language dictionary.

The latter term derived from the expression that something is "all between the ears," in other words, "all in the mind."