The Kopimist ethic is a single instruction — release what you make — and a set of habits that follow from it: publishing under terms that permit copying, preferring the remix to the original, treating the encryption of shared information as a compromise rather than a virtue. There is no enforcement, no discipline and no mechanism for expelling anyone, which is consistent with a body that regards restriction as the sin. Where the ethic bites is on its own members: a kopimist who copyrights their work is doing something the church regards as a failure, though nothing happens as a result. The position overlaps closely with the copyleft and Creative Commons movements, and kopimists tend to describe those as fellow travellers rather than as the same thing.