Isak Gerson was nineteen and reading philosophy at Uppsala when he founded the congregation in autumn 2010, with Gustav Nipe, in the middle of Sweden's file-sharing prosecutions. He took the title of spiritual leader and gave most of the church's interviews through the registration period. What is notable in the record is his restraint: pressed repeatedly by international journalists to say that Sweden had legalised piracy, he declined, and said that registration was a recognition of the community's form rather than of its claims. The church has never built a hierarchy above the Op, has no seminary and no successor arrangement, and its public activity has been intermittent since the middle of the 2010s.