The Contract Watchtower Just Made Every JW Sign

When Jehovah's Witnesses opened the JW Library app recently, they were stopped before they could read a single word. A full-page legal agreement appeared on screen. They could not skip it or tap past it. They had to scroll to the bottom and accept. What they accepted was a binding legal contract with the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of New York — and almost none of them actually read it.

Buried inside that contract is a section on medical information that says, in writing, not to rely on Watchtower publications for medical decisions. That is a stunning thing for an organization that has spent 80 years commanding its members to refuse blood transfusions. But as I will show, the medical disclaimer is only one piece of a much larger legal architecture — one that is designed not to protect users, but to protect the institution from the people calling it to account.

The Medical Disclaimer That Contradicts 80 Years of Doctrine

Section six of the new terms is titled "Medical Information." It reads, in part:

The medical information is not designed, intended, or authorized for use in connection with any medical or life-saving or life-sustaining decisions, systems, or procedures, or any other application or purpose.

And then, a few sentences later:

Always seek the advice of a physician or other qualified health care provider with any question you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment. Reliance on any medical information is solely at your own risk.

Watchtower has been telling its members to refuse blood transfusions since 1945 — 80 years. They published advanced medical directive cards, which members were expected to carry in their wallets, instructing doctors to refuse blood under any circumstances. Pre-2006 versions of those cards explicitly told members to refuse to pre-donate and store their own blood for later use during surgery. AJWRB did a meta-analysis estimating that over 33,000 Witnesses have died from not accepting blood. Watchtower has never released its own accounts, so the true number cannot be confirmed.

And if a baptized Witness unrepentantly accepts a blood transfusion, the organization treats them as if they have formally disassociated themselves. They get shunned — by family, friends, anyone in the congregation. Cut off completely. For making a medical decision in consultation with a physician. Which is exactly what the new terms of service tell them to do.

Watchtower's legal department has now put in writing the exact opposite of what the religion preaches from the platform and punishes its members for doing. From the stage: obey the blood doctrine, even if it costs your life. From the legal department: do not rely on our medical information for life-saving decisions. That is not an accident. It is a shield.

Why Now: The Timeline That Makes the Strategy Visible

This medical disclaimer has existed on the jw.org website since 2023. But it was buried in a page footer. Nobody had to click it. Nobody had to agree to it. It was browse-wrap — a legal term for terms that are posted but not actively accepted — which courts uphold only about 14% of the time.

What changed is not the text. What changed is the forced acceptance.

The timing is the thing worth watching. On March 20, 2026, Governing Body member Garrett Losch announced that Jehovah's Witnesses can now decide for themselves whether to have their own blood drawn, stored, and reinfused during surgery — a practice called autologous blood storage. Pre-2026 advanced medical directives told Witnesses they must refuse that procedure. After March 20, 2026, it became a personal conscience matter.

A little over a month later, the Norwegian Supreme Court issued its final ruling in the state of Norway versus Jehovah's Witnesses. After years of litigation in which the Norwegian government tried to deregister the religion over the damage caused by shunning practices, the court ruled in Watchtower's favor — though two of the five justices dissented.

Within days of that ruling, Witnesses started reporting that the new forced terms of service had appeared in the JW Library app. Blood doctrine partially reversed. Norway shunning case won. Forced legal contract rolled out worldwide. All inside about a month and a half.

Survivors of past blood doctrine deaths could start asking civil courts to hold Watchtower accountable for what its publications told their loved ones to do. Moving the medical disclaimer from a footnote on a website to a mandatory click-wrap agreement that every app user must sign raises its enforceability from roughly 14% to roughly 70%, based on industry analysis of US case law. The same legal text that was sitting in the basement got moved to the front door. And they locked the front door.

The Reproduction Restriction and What Watchtower Says About It

The medical disclaimer is not the only significant section. The contract also prohibits users from posting any artwork, electronic publications, trademarks, music, photos, videos, or articles from the app on the internet — any website, file-sharing site, video-sharing site, or social network.

That sounds like standard copyright protection. Every major publisher has something similar. But Watchtower actually published an explanation of why they do it, and the explanation is far more revealing than the restriction itself.

The terms of service link, right at the top before the legal text begins, to an article in the April 2018 issue of The Watchtower Study Edition. The article is titled "Why Is It Not Permissible to Post Publications of Jehovah's Witnesses on a Personal Website or on Social Media?" Watchtower gives three reasons in their own words.

The first:

Apostates and other opposers try to use our publications on their websites to lure in Jehovah's Witnesses and others. Planted in those sites is material designed to sow doubts in readers' minds.

The framing is that critics use Watchtower publications to criticize Watchtower. That is the reason stated. The second reason is more candid:

By securing copyright and trademark protection, we have a legal basis to prevent such misuse. But if we knowingly allow people, even our brothers, to post our digital content on other sites or to use the JW org trademark to sell merchandise, the courts may not support our efforts to deter opposers and commercial enterprises.

Watchtower is telling its own members that the reason they restrict sharing their publications is so that courts will support their efforts to take legal action against critics. The copyright restriction exists to enable lawsuits against opposers. That is not my characterization — it is what the article says in print. The third reason:

Furthermore, posting our publications on websites that allows comments provides a place for apostates and other critics to sow distrust of Jehovah's organization.

Watchtower has to enforce this strictly so courts will continue to back them when they come after the people they call apostates.

The Kevin McFree Case and the Limits of Copyright Law

In 2017 and 2018, a former Jehovah's Witness known online as Kevin McFree created a series of stop-motion Lego animations on YouTube called Dub Town — a fictional Jehovah's Witness town, dark humor, pointed criticism of Watchtower culture. In 2018, Watchtower filed a DMCA subpoena against him, claiming one of his videos infringed their copyrights, and asked YouTube to hand over his identity so they could sue him. McFree refused to be identified. Pro bono counsel stepped in. The fight ran for three years. In 2021, Watchtower did file a copyright infringement lawsuit. Then in January 2022, a federal judge ruled that McFree's videos were parody, criticism, and commentary — and therefore protected under the doctrine of fair use. The DMCA subpoena was denied. The Public Citizen Litigation Group entered the case, and four months later, in May 2022, Watchtower agreed to dismiss the entire copyright lawsuit with prejudice. They cannot try it against McFree again.

Watchtower almost always appeals to the highest court available. That is part of their litigation practice — the process is the punishment. My financial model puts Watchtower's value at approximately $55 billion. They have a full legal department. They can afford to fight far longer than most individuals can. So why did they walk away from this one?

Attorney Paul Levy of Public Citizen, who defended McFree after the dismissal, investigated the broader pattern. What he found was that over the previous five years, Watchtower had filed 70 DMCA subpoenas — and only one of them had been followed by an actual copyright infringement lawsuit. The one against McFree himself. In every other case, Watchtower got the identity and walked away.

DMCA subpoenas cost about fifty dollars to file. They require almost no evidence. What they do is force platforms like YouTube, Reddit, and Cloudflare to hand over the real identity of an anonymous user. The stated purpose is copyright enforcement. But if you almost never file a copyright lawsuit after getting the identity, then the stated purpose is a pretext.

Levy documented what Watchtower actually did with the identity in at least one case. In 2018, Watchtower filed a DMCA subpoena that successfully identified an anonymous blogger who had been writing about Watchtower's failures to report child sexual abuse to law enforcement. After getting that identity, according to Levy, disfellowshipping proceedings were initiated against the blogger. Watchtower got what they came for. It had nothing to do with copyright.

So when the McFree judge ruled fair use, Watchtower faced two choices. Appeal — and risk a federal precedent that would make it harder to use DMCA subpoenas to unmask critics in the future. Or walk away and preserve the playbook. They walked away.

The Click-Wrap Contract: A Second Legal Weapon

The new forced terms of service in JW Library are Watchtower's strategic answer to the problem the McFree case created.

Fair use is a defense to copyright infringement. It is not a defense to breach of contract. Those are two completely different causes of action.

Before the forced click-wrap was added, if a critic posted a Watchtower article online, Watchtower had one weapon: DMCA. They could claim copyright infringement. The critic could raise fair use, and it would work almost every time — which is why Watchtower almost never actually pursues copyright infringement lawsuits, and why they lost against McFree. Fair use defeats copyright claims.

The click-wrap does not repeal copyright law. Fair use is still fair use. A critic who posts Watchtower content can still raise the same defense McFree used and probably still win. But the click-wrap gives Watchtower a second weapon: breach of contract.

When you tap accept on the JW Library agreement, you sign a contract that says you will not post Watchtower's artwork, electronic publications, music, photos, videos, or articles on the internet. That is a promise. If you break that promise, Watchtower can sue you for breaking the promise. Not for copyright infringement — for breach of contract. And in a breach of contract case, the court does not ask whether your use was fair. It asks whether you made the promise and whether you kept it. Did you sign? Yes. Did you post the material? Yes. Then you are in breach.

Fair use was never designed to defeat a contract. It was designed to defeat a copyright claim. So even if a future critic wins the fair use fight the way McFree did, they still have to fight a second lawsuit on a separate track, under New York law, in New York courts, with a six-month statute of limitations, and a contractual obligation to pay Watchtower's attorney's fees if they lose. In a lawsuit that was eventually settled, Watchtower's lawyers billed $205,000 — more than twenty times the actual damages in that case. The legal bill is the punishment, not the damages.

A critic might argue they did not get the material from the app — they could have downloaded it from an archive site or obtained the print edition. That defense might eventually work in court. But once Watchtower files the breach of contract suit, the burden is on the defendant to prove it, through discovery, depositions, document requests, and potentially forensic examination of their devices. The cost of fighting is the punishment, even if you win.

Section four of the agreement does not prohibit posting whole articles. It prohibits reproducing any portion of the application. Any portion. A single screenshot. The contract is drafted so that almost any commentary that includes Watchtower's content at all is technically a breach. And for current members or recently active Witnesses — the people most likely to post Watchtower content online with informed criticism — JW Library is how they actually access the material.

Five Layers of Legal Protection

The medical disclaimer and the reproduction restriction are two sections of a broader legal architecture. The full contract has five distinct layers working together.

Layer one, section one — grant of license:

This application is licensed, not sold to you.

You do not own JW Library. You are renting it. And under section five, the license can be terminated:

at any time for any reason or no reason without liability or obligation to you.

Layer two, section eight — limitation of liability:

The entire liability of the Watch Tower parties collectively and your exclusive remedy hereunder shall be limited to 1,000 US dollars.

If Watchtower is found liable for anything related to the application, the maximum they will pay is one thousand dollars.

Layer three, section nine — indemnity:

You shall indemnify, defend, and hold Watch Tower harmless from and against any and all threatened or actual claims, including without limitation reasonable attorney's fees.

If anyone sues Watchtower over something connected to your use of the app, you pay their legal bills.

Layer four, section thirteen — governing law and forum:

This agreement shall be governed and construed in accordance with the laws of the state of New York.

The same section sets the statute of limitations:

Any claim, suit, or action that you may have against any of the Watch Tower parties arising under or related to this agreement must be brought within six months after the date on which the event underlying such claim occurred.

Six months. Most jurisdictions allow years for civil claims. Try to put together a wrongful death case based on medical guidance from JW Library under that constraint, and if you lose, you pay Watchtower's lawyers.

Courts have upheld properly designed click-wrap agreements in landmark cases — Feldman v. Google, the Second Circuit's ruling in Meyer v. Uber on arbitration clauses. Industry analysis based on US case law puts click-wrap enforceability at roughly 70%, versus roughly 14% for browse-wrap agreements where terms are simply posted on a website. Watchtower's old medical disclaimer was browse-wrap. The new version, requiring a tap to accept, is click-wrap. Same legal text, moved to the front door.

The EFF Case Running Right Now

Everything described so far is already documented. What is happening right now in federal court is what proves this is not a theory.

In early December 2025, approximately five months before the forced click-wrap rollout, Watchtower filed two DMCA subpoenas in federal court — one directed at Google, one at Cloudflare. The target of both subpoenas was the anonymous operator of a website called JW Library. Not Watchtower's official app, but a separate research tools website that allows users to search, analyze, and verify how Watchtower's public statements have changed over time.

The operator, identified in court filings only as John Doe, is a current member of Jehovah's Witnesses. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is representing Doe without charge, Doe and others using the site have:

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 policies.

Doe is anonymous because if Watchtower learns who Doe is, Doe gets disfellowshipped. The EFF describes this directly in their case materials:

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.

TechDirt's count puts Watchtower's total DMCA subpoenas at 72 as of March 2026, following these two filings. The EFF has filed motions to quash both subpoenas, arguing that Doe's research and commentary constitute clear fair use and that the First Amendment protects anonymous speech — especially against weak copyright claims. The cases are ongoing in the Southern District of New York.

Paul Polidoro and the Right Watchtower Built — Then Turned Against Its Own Members

The in-house counsel who personally signed the 2018 DMCA subpoena against McFree, and who has been signing these subpoenas for years, is named Paul Polidoro.

In 2002, Polidoro argued before the United States Supreme Court in Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York v. Village of Stratton. Watchtower's position in that case was that a village ordinance requiring door-to-door canvassers to register their identity with the town before going door to door violated the First Amendment right to anonymous free speech. Polidoro won. The Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 that the ordinance violated the First Amendment.

Watchtower's own First Amendment lawyer, who successfully argued before the Supreme Court that anonymous speech must be protected, is now using federal subpoenas to strip First Amendment-protected anonymity from internal critics who are using Watchtower's published materials to engage in exactly the kind of anonymous speech the Stratton ruling protected.

The protection Polidoro secured for Watchtower's own members — the right to speak anonymously about a religious organization — is the same protection the legal department he helped build is now spending to dismantle for the people inside the religion.

The First-Century Claim and What the Evidence Says

Jehovah's Witnesses are taught constantly — from the platform, in the publications — that they are the only modern restoration of first-century Christianity. The original church, the pure form, the one true religion.

First-century Christians spread their message at extraordinary personal cost. Jesus told his disciples explicitly what to expect. In John 15:20:

Remember the word that I said to you, a servant is not greater than his master. If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you.

And in John 16:33:

In the world you are having tribulation, but take heart. I have overcome the world.

Jesus did not tell his disciples to circle the wagons. He did not tell them to control where the message went or to draft contracts. Paul wrote letters from prison. When he was dragged before governors, he used the moment to preach. The first-century Christians wanted the message to go everywhere — including into the wrong hands. In his letter to the Philippians, Paul wrote:

What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed. And in that, I rejoice.

Now compare that to what Watchtower is doing. They are using the laws of the state of New York to prevent their own publications from reaching the people they call apostates and critics. They are using federal subpoenas to identify anonymous members so they can be disfellowshipped. They have a click-wrap contract that prohibits posting Watchtower content on any website, file-sharing site, video-sharing site, or social network — under New York law, with a six-month statute of limitations, with a provision requiring users to pay Watchtower's legal bills if they lose, capped at one thousand dollars in Watchtower's liability. Accept it, or you cannot read the Bible on your phone.

The first-century church faced opposition by speaking louder. Watchtower is facing opposition by trying to silence the speakers. You cannot be the modern restoration of the first-century church and run a corporate litigation defense at the same time. The two things are not just different — they are opposites.

Three independent lines of evidence all point in the same direction. The medical shield reads as preparation for civil suits over deaths under a blood doctrine the organization just partially reversed. The reproduction restriction exists because, by Watchtower's own published statement, courts will not deter critics if Watchtower does not enforce its copyrights aggressively. And the DMCA campaign — McFree, the 72 subpoenas, the child abuse blogger, the current JW Library case — shows a sustained legal operation running for at least seven years, in direct contradiction to the First Amendment principle their own lawyer argued before the Supreme Court.

Watchtower has stopped trying to win the argument. They are losing the argument, losing members, losing court cases, and losing the ability to keep doctrinal contradictions hidden in a world where everything they have ever published is searchable. They have shifted their weight from persuasion to litigation. From scripture to New York State courts. The behavior is the answer to the claim. And the behavior points in exactly the opposite direction.