Kopimism

Kopimism's roots are activist before they are religious. Piratbyran, "the Bureau of Piracy," formed in Sweden in 2003 as a satirical counter-organization to the country's newly created Antipiracy Bureau, and in January 2005 it registered the domain kopimi.com: a simple invitation for anyone to mark their own material "kopimi," inviting the world to copy it freely. Piratbyran's members went on to found the file sharing site the Pirate Bay the same year, but the kopimi idea kept its own separate life as a standalone ethic rather than merging fully into that better known project.

In 2010 Isak Gerson, then a nineteen-year-old philosophy student, formalized that ethic as a church. His reasoning was practical as much as devotional: Swedish law offers religious communities specific protections that ordinary activist groups do not receive, and Gerson argued that if file sharing truly functioned as a sincerely held ethical practice for a real community of people, it deserved to be tested against that legal category directly rather than only defended as ordinary political speech.

The test took three attempts. Kammarkollegiet, Sweden's Legal, Financial and Administrative Services Agency, rejected the Missionary Church of Kopimism's registration application twice before formally recognizing it as a religious community on 5 January 2012, the agency evidently satisfied that the church's six axioms, its "operator" clergy and its gathering places functioned as a coherent belief system and not merely as a legal maneuver dressed in religious language.

Kopimism has no deity and no afterlife doctrine, which makes it an unusually clean test of how narrowly or broadly a legal system defines religion. Its six axioms instead treat information itself as the sacred category: copying information is ethically right, information is inherently holy, and copying and remixing are how all information, from strands of DNA to spoken language to digital files, actually propagates and survives at every scale of life. The internet, in Kopimist doctrine, is holy precisely because it is the medium that makes copying instantaneous and universal, extending a pattern the axioms hold has always been true of information into a form fast enough to notice.

The church's ritual vocabulary follows directly from the doctrine. Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V, the keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste, function as sacred symbols in daily practice, treated the way a cross or a prayer bead functions elsewhere; the church's logo, a K inside a pyramid, marks its gathering places, called "interaction points"; and its clergy equivalents, "operators," teach and model the axioms rather than administer sacraments in any older liturgical sense.

Kammarkollegiet's eventual approval in January 2012, after two rejections, suggests the agency judged Kopimism by the coherence and sincerity of its practice rather than by the conventionality of its object of reverence. That standard cuts both ways for comparison with Pastafarianism: Kopimism's doctrine is stranger by ordinary religious measures, having no god at all, and yet secured a cleaner, more complete state recognition on its first successful attempt than Pastafarianism has achieved in any single country after two decades of trying.