Philosophy student Isak Gerson is such a religious file-sharer, and in an attempt to protect his unique belief system he founded The Missionary Church of Kopimism in 2010. In the hope that they could help prevent persecution for their beliefs, the Church then filed a request to be officially accepted by the authorities.

After two failed attempts, where the Church was asked to formalize its way of praying or meditation, the authorities finally recognized the organization as an official religion. The Church’s founder is ecstatic about this news, and hopes that it will motivate more people to come forward as ‘Kopimists’.

“I think that more people will have the courage to step out as Kopimists. Maybe not in the public, but at least to their close ones,” Isak tells TorrentFreak. “There’s still a legal stigma around copying for many. A lot of people still worry about going to jail when copying and remixing. I hope in the name of Kopimi that this will change.”

Although the formal status of the Church doesn’t mean that copyright infringement is now permitted, the Church’s founder hopes that their beliefs will be considered in future lawmaking.

During the last half year the Missionary Church of Kopimism tripled its members from 1,000 to 3,000 and it’s expected that the recent news will cause another surge in followers. Official member or not, Gerson encourages everyone with an Internet connection to keep on sharing.

“We confessional Kopimists have not only depended on each other in this struggle, but on everyone who is copying information. To everyone with an internet connection: Keep copying. Maintain hardline Kopimi,” Gerson concludes.

Prospective followers who embrace the same calling are of course welcome to join the movement, free of charge.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Make no mistake, if the entertainment industries were God passing their sacred rulings to Moses, there would have almost certainly been one more – Thou Shalt Not Copy. But for the followers of a brand new religion in Sweden, this commandment would be against everything they believe in.

The congregation at Missionary Kopimistsamfundet – The Missionary Church of Kopimism – believe that copying is to be embraced by religion and they hope that very shortly this way of life will be officially accepted by the authorities.

Founded by 19-year-old philosophy student, Isaac Gerson, this brand new church believes that copying and the sharing of information is the most beautiful thing in the world. To have your information copied is a token of appreciation, say the church, a sure sign that people think you have done something good.

For those thinking this is some kind of late April Fool’s joke, think again.

In late 2010 the church applied to the authorities to be accepted as an official religion. That application was denied at the end of March on the basis that although the church is indeed a community, its meetings did not constitute ‘worship’. Undeterred, the church founders have requested a meeting to find out what is required in order to gain official acceptance. They certainly aren’t giving in.

“Throughout history, various groups around the world have been persecuted by oppressors. They have since taken refuge in religion with a desire for a peaceful coexistence. Without threats and harassment,” the church explain.

“In our belief, communication is sacred. Communication needs to be respected. It is a direct sin to monitor and eavesdrop on people. Absolute secrecy is holy in the Church of Kopimism.”

The church has its own set of axioms, most of which revolve around free access to knowledge and the sharing of information. They include:

# Reproduction of information is ethically right.
# The flow of information is ethically right.
# Remix Spirit is a sacred kind of copying.
# Copying or remixing information conveyed by another person is an act of respect.

The church is also acutely against DRM and other methods of protecting or hiding code.

“To appropriate software (to keep source code hidden from others), is comparable to slavery, and should be banned,” they declare.

Perhaps predictably the church use the ‘Kopimi’ logo (a pyramid with the letter K inside) as their official symbol and hold CTRL+C and CTRL+V as sacred.

Joining the church seems fairly easy too. All you have to do is agree that everything should be copied and information should be free in line with the axioms above, then load the church’s website so that the ‘kopimi’ logo refreshes (or indeed draw it, or copy it in any way) and you’re in. Potential followers can request more information by using the online form here.

In common with many other religions around the world, expect the followers of the Missionary Church of Kopimism to be widely persecuted for their beliefs. Praying they don’t get caught while practising them will offer little protection. After all, even the Pope backs up his faith with bullet-proof glass.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Let’s start with a great fact: that, as Rasmus Fleischer of Piratbyran points out, the entire Pirate Bay could fit on a single USB stick. This got me thinking: what if someone was to simply scrape and copy all The Pirate Bay’s torrents over to a new tracker and Mininova and all the other indexes currently using the TPB tracker were to change their listings to point to that? OpenBitTorrent.com for example, an independent open tracker which started recently.

What if someone else — it could be anyone; it could be you! — decided to make a new index of these torrents. Call it ‘The Pirate Ship’, ‘Brand New Pirate’, whatever. I’m sure someone has already got a domain ready and waiting for this.

This new index would be functionally equivalent to The Pirate Bay. By the magic of copy-and-paste, TPB would have transplanted itself somewhere new. The corporate ‘buyers’ are free to run the old site into the ground with whatever specious business models they care to waste their shareholders’ money on, while The Pirate Bay’s new foundation uses it to fund interesting, new projects.

Think about it for a moment. What would be the downside of the sale here?

Privacy, possibly — a serious concern. Had The Pirate Bay been keeping logs of seeders and leechers, the acquiring company could — after flailing about for a few months trying to sell bits and bandwidth — auction this to the highest bidder. But TPB have been scrupulously failing to keep such logs. So provided people switch at the right time — as I’m sure they’ll have the intelligence to — there will simply be nothing to sell.

Let’s not be glib about it: after the shenanigans with insider trading, who knows if the deal goes through. But if it does, those behind TPB may have managed to square the circle, sliding out from behind the old, compromised identity while handing-off everything of value (tracker, torrents, users) to the community.

The very fact that this is possible should give those backing business models based on copy-restriction something serious to think about. Not only is this not a blow for P2P, it’s a signal of something very worrying for the MPAA and Co. Spend years going after the world’s most prominent pirate site, only to find that when you get it, it dematerializes and by the magic of copy-and-paste, reappears elsewhere in a different guise. It’s like Whack-A-Mole with infinite holes, infinite moles, and just one hammer. Your odds: not good.

The feelings of betrayal and being ‘sold out’ by the TPB founders are natural. We believe(d) in The Pirate Bay; The Pirate Bay was ‘forever’. But in one way, an important way, this belief was right: what made The Pirate Bay possible is forever.Even if I’m wrong, and a service like OpenBittorrent doesn’t immediately get populated with all the torrents from the old database, the ‘community’ should learn some lessons from this:

(1) Big != Good

Let’s face it: The Pirate Bay itself had become a huge focus of attention for those trying to preserve the old copy-restriction model of the culture industries. By some accounts TPB’s tracker has been responsible for 50% of all Internet traffic, and its founders have been looming larger and larger, waving their pirate flags more and more visibly, for quite a few years. They are international celebrities and, love them as we might, that made them and TPB targets. It’s not a secret that quite a few peers on the TPB trackers today are ‘spies’, there to gather data on legitimate peers — a real danger to Bittorrent users. And as well being feted, Brokep, Anakata and Tiamo have been followed, spied on, raided, arrested, maligned, sentenced and, now live under a real threat of imprisonment.

The bigger we get, the more of a target we are. Mininova, isoHunt and TPB have all been under siege these last years. We need to stop thinking about ‘one stop shops’ for our media. Distribution and aggregation point the way: think ‘separation of powers’. Clients like Miro can aggregate feeds from a variety of sources according to the needs of the user. TPB may have represented the needs of the community for half a decade or more, but we don’t need them. We are our own media infrastructure!

(2) We are all The Pirate Bay now…

… and this is why we have to amend our idea about what being a ‘pirate’ is. In the P2P world, as in that of Web 2.0, it’s us and our sharing that makes the value. Hopefully some of the indignation leveled at The Pirate Bay in the last few days will cause us to think not only about the weirdness of entrusting all this value to TPB, but about all those corporate behemoths — Facebook, say, or Twitter or YouTube — who play fast and loose with the value that we create for them every day. Make no mistake, we’ll wait a thousand years for the Mark Zuckerbergs of this world to start a foundation with the billions they have made from us and our interactions.

We’re all The Pirate Bay now because we all make media; we all copy media, we all redistribute media and because the ‘war against piracy’ has criminalized us. Young or old, middle or working class, any of us could expect that letter from the RIAA or MPAA at any moment. Our online activities are routinely surveilled in the attempt to preserve a paradigm that is manifestly outdated. That fits well with the totalitarian mentality of many of our governments and it isn’t to be accepted casually.

So is it really enough to throw a little bit of bandwidth into the cloud, vote Pirate Party, and then wax indignant about betrayal of a ‘community’ when its end (however temporarily) comes? Is that a sufficient resistance to the erosion of our liberties, to which the ‘war against piracy’ contributes?

What about grabbing one of the many, free ready made trackers out there and starting up our own Bays? By letting a thousand Pirate Bays bloom, we can demonstrate the futility of trying to prop up the old system, speeding the adoption of new models to help artists and ourselves make and distribute culture.

(3) Copy + Paste will never die.

Actually, as I’ve said, I suspect that none of TPB’s functionality, not a single torrent, will have been lost in this ‘sell out’. I say this partly because of what I know of its founders, and partly because of my conviction that we live in a world in which the copy predominates, evading all attempts to outlaw it and rendering attempts to ‘buy it off’ futile.

Let’s just remind ourselves again: the entire code and all the torrents for TPB — information which accounts for half the traffic on the internet — fits on a single USB key. Perhaps someone will find a way to make a torrent of THAT. And then we can all sit around and wonder what it is, precisely, Global Gaming Factory have bought for all their millions.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

“Though seeded in prehistory, Kopimi is rooted in the future, and holds together a constantly vibrating avalanche of knowledge that forms the foundation for a discussion indifferent to the rippling changes of time and space,” reads the prelude of the manifesto.

TorrentFreak talked to Marcin de Kaminski of the Kopimi Project – which expands way beyond TPB – to get some background information on the manifesto. “We are a close group of people, formed as a cluster – or a swarm if you prefer – which has been doing web related projects since the early 2000,” he told us.

“Many people have tried to describe what kind of people we are and why we are doing all the things we do. No one has come even close. We thought it was time for an official biography of some sort, and to try to show people that we have done lots of things besides our filesharing projects,” Marcin explained.

The manifesto can be seen as a guide on how to live life as a true Kopimist, summarized in a list of 100 principles or guidelines. The Kopimi team came up with the idea this Sunday afternoon. Yesterday – only two days later – the Swedish version was published followed by the English translation a day later.

Some of our personal favorites here at TorrentFreak:

012. Don’t think outside the box. Build a box.
057. At a trial, deny everything.
069. Take care of small animals.
100. Stop using IRL. Use AFK instead.

The .torrent for the manifesto is available on The Pirate Bay. Of course everyone is encouraged to ‘share, translate, remix, bend, modify, copy, trash, bash, move, publish, burn, hide, remake’ – in true Kopimi style.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.