History & overview · every faith gets one
Copying is a sacrament. CTRL+C, CTRL+V.
Kopimism holds that information is holy, that copying it is a sacred act, and that what the laws of physics permit should not be restrained by the laws of states. It has no god, no afterlife and no scripture — its whole doctrine is the value of the copy. It was founded by a nineteen-year-old philosophy student in Uppsala in 2010, at the height of Sweden's file-sharing prosecutions, and in the winter of 2011–12 the Kammarkollegiet registered it as a trossamfund, a religious community, on its third application. That registration made Sweden the first state to admit a church whose sacrament is duplication, and it changed nothing legally: Kopimism has never held marriage rights or drawn the state subsidy other registered communities receive.
Why it is filed this way
Kopimism is filed as parody with a caveat its members would press. It was built in the shape of a religion in order to make a political argument about copyright, which is the parody move. But it makes no claim it does not hold, asks nothing of members it does not do itself, and its adherents state their belief in the sanctity of information without irony. The Kammarkollegiet did not rule on sincerity; Swedish registration tests whether a body has statutes, a name and a decision-making order, not whether its faith is real.
The founding
Gerson, then nineteen and studying philosophy at Uppsala, founded the congregation in the autumn of 2010 in the middle of the Pirate Bay prosecutions and the Swedish argument over copyright enforcement. Two applications to the Kammarkollegiet, in April and July 2011, were refused. The third succeeded: the agency's decision came in December 2011 and was reported in the first week of January 2012. Kopimists were careful about what had been granted — registration as a trossamfund confers a legal form, not an exemption from copyright law, and no Kopimist has successfully pleaded it as a defence.
Its founding is bound to Isak Gerson and Gustav Nipe — 2010 CE.
What it holds
Reality. Information is the substance of the world and copying is how it lives. Every copy is an act of creation; every restriction on copying is a subtraction from what exists..
The divine. No god and no supernatural claim of any kind. What is treated as sacred is information itself and the act of reproducing it..
Death and after. None taught..