Filesharing Now a Religious Practice in Sweden
If you thought information sharing online has reached an almost fever pitch, you might have been having an early religious awakening. Perhaps it’s high time you took a pilgrimage to Sweden...
In what is likely an attempt to earn some form of legal respectability, a handful of self-proclaimed Swedish file sharing bit-torrent type “pirates” have formulated a religion around their practice. Called Kopimism, the church was founded in 2010, and centers largely around its adherents’ favorite past-time: using online file sharing servers to share digital files with each other.
Of course, many countries, including Sweden, have legal issues with any use of torrent systems to share copyright protected materials. Church founder Isak Gerson, a philosophy major in college, calls this persecution, and believes obtaining formal religious recognition could be one way to end his fellow Kopimists’ potential legal woes.
After two attempts by Gerson to get Kopimism formally recognized as a faith, Swedish officials finally caved in and accepted The Missionary Church of Kopimism as a legally-recognized method of religious practice in their country. Since recognition, church membership has grown to 3,000.
According to a Swedish press release, all “information is sacred” to Kopimists, with the act of copying it their holy sacrament. I'm sure, sacrament or not, courtrooms throughout Sweden won't blink an eye over prosecuting future copying of protected materials.
Of course, you don’t have to be a church member to practice the tenets of Kopimism; it would be odd for a faith grounded in the act of sharing information to have issues with someone copying its core message. “We confessional Kopimists have not only depended on each other in this struggle, but on everyone who is copying information,” said Gerson.
I don’t know if the keyboard combination of Control-Alt-Delete would be considered some form of Holy Trinity with Kopimists. If you would like to learn more about the faith, you can visit the Church’s online headquarters.
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