[5] 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.
Some of her subjects are: 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.
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.
In 1995, the Church of Scientology began a legal campaign to remove what it asserted were copyright infringements and trade secrets from the Internet.
[citation needed] 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.
[citation needed] 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.
[18][19] The three judges found that Spaink and the providers might indeed have broken Dutch copyright law; quotation is not allowed of works that have not been previously published, and whether or not the release as evidence in a US court case counts as 'publication' was considered dubious.
The court held it proven that Scientology is an organisation that tries to undermine democracy,[20] and ruled that Spaink had the right to quote the Church in her exposé.
This website garnered much controversy when, in October 2005, Christopher Aston (25) and Maria Williams (42) from Liverpool and London respectively, entered into a suicide pact after meeting on a newsgroup discussing the same subject.