Sunde’s destination was Västervik Norra, the prison allocated to him following the finalizing of his jail sentence in 2012.

The first few days and weeks of Sunde’s imprisonment went silently under the media radar, but by the end of June the former Pirate Bay spokesman was making his voice heard on his prison conditions.

Sunde has been both vegetarian and vegan, a dietary choice that has proven difficult during his incarceration. In a letter to authorities he complained that due to his needs not being met, his weight had plummeted 11 pounds (5kgs) in just four weeks.

It’s not clear whether that complaint resulted in any positive action, but just a month later Sunde is making his displeasure known once more, this time over his religious rights.

Four years ago a group of self-confessed pirates began a mission to have their beliefs recognized as a religion in Sweden. The Church of Kopimism – which holds CTRL+C and CTRL+V as sacred symbols – eventually prevailed and in 2012 was officially approved by the authorities.

Just recently Sunde tried to exercise his right to meet with a representative of his chosen religion, but was met with prison red tape in response.

“The board of spiritual care (NAV) doesn’t have any representative for the Kopimist faith with whom they cooperate and therefore the Prison and Probation Service should provide permission for electronic contact with representatives from the Kopimist faith to believers,” Sunde wrote in his letter to authorities.

Whether this complaint will result in physical or even virtual access to a Kopimist priest is not yet clear. However, since Kopimism is an official religion, the authorities may have little choice but to comply. This throws up an interesting privacy-related question that Sunde himself mused over some two-and-a-half years ago.

“In some religions…there’s a Seal of Confession – which means that when you talk to a priest in the congregation, the priest has to keep what you say confidential. This is respected in some countries as law, where the courts can not make the priest testify against the individual,” Sunde said in 2012.

“This is probably the thing that I love the most with Kopimism as a religion – we can have yet another form of P2P communication – Priest2Priest. With no legal right for anyone to listen in to the conversation perhaps.”

It seems highly unlikely that Sunde will be allowed an online “encrypted confession” with a Kopimism “priest” anytime soon, but The Church of Kopimism’s legal status could throw up some headaches and dilemmas for the authorities as they try to process Peter’s complaint.

Not that he intended that, of course.

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The law, which critics say is overbroad and likely to cause collateral damage, is opposed by big companies such as Google, local search engine Yandex, Internet resources such as Wikipedia and thousands of website operators and users.

But just as protests including last week’s blackout by 1,700 sites subside, a more unconventional front is opening up.

Later today pirate activists in five regions – Moscow, St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan and Khabarovsk – will submit documents to begin the process of having their church officially recognized by the authorities.

If that all goes to plan in a few years time Russia will have its own Church Kopimizma, but for the faithful there are important issues to be dealt with right now.

As soon as the papers are filed the church’s founders will file a lawsuit against the anti-piracy legislation that came into force August 1. They will do this on the basis that the law, which restricts copying and sharing, is an insult to Kopimists.

But according to lawyer Victor Naumov, separation of religion and state in Russia means that it’s unlikely that the complaint will achieve much, although an appeal could be made to the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation.

Nevertheless, the movement’s early followers are already showing commitment. Izvestia reports that a Kopimist-inspired wedding between Olga Koroleva and Vladislav Petrushenka took place yesterday but instead of the traditional exchange of rings, the pair exchanged microchips which they plan to have embedded in their bodies.

However, Church Kopimizma announced on Facebook that the pirate wedding was actually the outcome of a collaboration between Pastafarians and the Russian Pirate Church.

The new Russian Kopimist church will closely follow the values pioneered by Sweden’s Church of Kopimism, a religion that was formally recognized by the authorities there in 2012.

This means that it’s likely that CTRL+C and CTRL+V will likely be held as sacred symbols, and the acts of sharing and copying will be viewed as the most beautiful things in the world. The church also believes that the value of information increases the more it’s spread and that while confidentiality is sacred, listening in to other people’s conversations is the greatest sin.

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

The breakthrough came after a group of self-confessed pirates went on a two-year mission to have their beliefs recognized as a formal religion in Sweden. Despite being rejected several times, the Church of Kopimism – which holds CTRL+C and CTRL+V as sacred symbols – refused to give up and in January 2012 was eventually recognized as an official religion.

Now, just a year later, the Kopimism movement – which is diverse, has no leaders and doesn’t start or end with the church – has received yet another boost.

The Swedish Language Council (Språkrådet), the body responsible for the advancement and cultivation of the Swedish language, publishes an annual list where it recognizes new words that have established themselves during the previous year.

And there, pride of place in the shortlist, is the word “kopimism”, described by the Language Council as a “political and religious ideology centered around freedom of information.”

But while that might sound like a decent description, not everyone agrees.

Rasmus Fleischer is one of the founders of Piratbyrån, the group that founded The Pirate Bay and created the term kopimism. He suggests that given the chance he might have chosen another definition.

“To me, kopimi is not about information, neither about freedom. It is about copying!” he told TorrentFreak.

“It is simply an imperative: ‘copy me’. It is also a symbol: a pyramid with a K. If you say ‘kopimi’ or show off the kopimi pyramid, you are stating that you want to be copied. That’s something completely different from a license. You are not saying that you are allowing others to do this or that – you urge them to copy,” Fleischer explains.

“As an attitude or even philosophy, kopimi became pivotal for the work of Piratbyrån.
Kopimi was never restricted to information. Actually, the origin of the word comes from a two-year old kid who was dancing and wanted his parent to copy the dance. I think that it may be more enlightening to understand kopimi through dance than through file-sharing.”

The Council says that the words on the list all say something about the present and linguistic trends and includes words that show linguistic creativity and innovation.

“Anyone using the Swedish language is creating and bringing new words to the language. And we’re all deciding which words are established in the language by choosing the words we use,” says Per-Anders Jande, a manager at the Language Council.

Gustav Nipe, chairman of the Missionary Church of Kopimism, says that the church are thrilled by the placement of kopimism on the list and believe that the recognition of the religion had an effect on the Language Council’s decision.

“We are very happy about it,” Nipe told TorrentFreak. “Kopimism as a belief is getting stronger and stronger respect here in Sweden.”

Interestingly, particularly for a word like Kopimism that was created offline but now has most of its following in the digital domain, the Swedish Language Council says that these days we often have to differentiate which world we are speaking about in conversation.

“We must now often specifically highlight that we’re talking about non-digital consumption – say a physical store, a physical journey, a physical disk and so on,” they explain.

And in another sign that the boundaries of these physical and digital domains can be crossed and interconnected, Gustav Nipe leaves us with this teaser.

“We are right in the middle of expanding the Missionary Church of Kopimism into the physical world. But more than that will I not say right now,” Nipe explains.

After speaking with Rasmus Fleischer it becomes clear that kopimi is an unusual concept. It has no-one leading the way and its development is in the hands of the next person who choses to copy it. According to Fleischer the description given by the Language Council is already unsatisfactory given the roots of the word, so it will presumably become even more outdated as new ideas and future copying acts further change the direction of kopimism.

“Every copy is a transformation, which also means that every use of kopimi is transforming the concept – not always for the better,” Fleischer explains.

“But kopimi has always been a quite discordian concept. I totally affirm the existence of complementary and even rivaling variants of kopimi.”

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