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== Criticism and legal issues ==
A growing number of former Scientologists have made public allegations that the Church encourages its members to complete very expensive courses and expect wonderful results; when the improvements fail to happen, further courses are then promoted to facilitate the anticipated changes. Criticism stems from a pattern of cycles wherein members continue to pay increasing amounts for these courses, while some even put their families into debt chasing elusive life-changing results under the stewardship of the Church.
In March 2008, WikiLeaks published leaked documents from the Church's OT level documents. The Church of Scientology portrayed hosting the documentation as a copyright violation implying that the collection is Church doctrine. Written demands from the Church were ignored by Wikileaks and, in an unrelated legal case, a "U.S. federal judge ruled that efforts to shut down [Wikileaks] violated constitutional rights to free speech".
In 1997, Zenon Panoussis, a resident of Sweden, sent copies of NOTs documents to various government authorities, thereby making the documents public according to the Swedish principle of public access to official records. The Church of Scientology responded by ordering members to continuously borrow the available copies in order to prevent non-members from reading them. The Church of Scientology also sued Panoussis for copyright infringement, since he had made the documents available online without authorization.
A similar incident occurred during the 1980s, during the trial of Wollersheim v. Church of Scientology. When the OT III documents had been entered into evidence, 1,500 Scientologists crammed the courthouse in an attempt to block public access to the documents by each requesting to photocopy them, thus overwhelming the clerk's office so no one else could access them.
== See also ==
Space opera in Scientology
Body thetan
== Notes ==
== References ==
== Further reading ==
Sappell, Joel; Welkos, Robert W. (June 24, 1990). "Defining the Theology". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on June 2, 2010. Retrieved October 26, 2008.
== External links ==
Summary of Operating Thetan levels I–VIII – Operation Clambake archive
The Fishman Affidavit – Spaink's archive of court-released and annotated OT documents
The Fishman Papers – Touretsky's archive of court-released and annotated OT documents
Collected OT documents – Wikileaks archive