Let me get this straight? Taxes are bunk but copyright has superpowers?

Creation Science Evangelism founded by Kent Hovind added a copyright to his materials.

Copyright was placed on all Creation Science Evangelism materials (no matter the production date) effective January 1, 2005.

They are not only claiming retroactive copyright of materials they placed in public domain, they are actually calling for their retroactive copyright to retroactively apply.

The Wayback machine calls up copy of Dr. Dino's site on 4/3/05 noting:

...to help others gain a better understanding of the creation/evolution subject and to help them spread the word. (None of the materials produced by Creation Science Evangelism are copyrighted, so feel free to copy those and distribute them freely.) Our web site is another facet of our ministry...

So, the "effective" date at least four months before they stopped releasing their material into public domain.

Not that the group understands the basics of law (Hovind is serving 10 years in jail currently) but they don't understand that you can't grab things back out of public domain. The fact is... I have as much right to copyright their pre-2005 material as they do.

Which brings us to the fun part... now, having claimed copyright to public domain materials they are now sending out DMCA take down notices to anybody who uses their materials (most is just video of Hovind being stupid and as he was convicted in 2006 very little material people want to make fun of falls under their copyright). So there are plenty of atheists on YouTube, who knowing that they don't claim copyright on those videos happily used the videos and made all sorts of fun of them. Well, now many of them got their accounts turned off such as The Rational Response Squad and RabidApe.

Not that it's legal to do this, but that would be the greatest trap in history. Produce a bunch of material where you say some of the dumbest stuff possible and tell other people it's fine to use the material... then after it's saturated the market enough, declare copyright and sue. The RSS ofcourse having just gotten their YouTube account back after having it shutdown by Uri Geller who claimed copyright on something he didn't own and got sued.

The RSS should post videos about scientology and go for the trifecta.