Let there be copy!
Founded by a 19-year-old Swedish philosophy student Isak Gerson, the Missionary Church of Kopimism is a unique form of congregation, gathering file sharers who claim copying information is a sacred virtue, “the best and most beautiful that is”.
Kopyacting – sharing knowledge through acts of copying – is a special kind of religious service where “those in attendance can communicate with each other via a compatible internet protocol, via for example a local area network, Internet or Bluetooth connection”. The church, which holds the copy/paste keyboard shortcuts CTRL+C and CTRL+V as sacred symbols, has recently been officially recognised by the Swedish authorities as a religious community, after three failed attempts. In the meantime, it has launched off-shot franchises across the globe, making Kopimism a small “world religion” on its own.
As the Kopimist constitution claims (shouldn’t it be called “the wholy file” or something?), “to belong to the Kopimist community, one need not be a member of any organisation. It is enough that one feels called to respect and worship the holiest of the holies, information.”
If religious institutions have been acting political since their beginnings, it doesn’t surprise that today’s political movements are becoming religions. And in many ways, isn’t that what Kopimism essentially is – a political movement, part of a global struggle for free information?
What exactly “free information” means remains an ongoing topic of various legal and philosophical debates, but in the centre of the discussion had always been the practice of copyright. From early on, copyright has been related to the rise of capitalism and the increasing commodification of our human experience, where thoughts, ideas and works of art need to be regulated as personal properties with a specific economic and market value. Ever since the Gutenberg printing press to our own age of Napsters, Pirate Bays, Wikileakses, Megauploads, the RRIAs, PIPAs and SOPAs, governments and large corporations have been negotiating on how to control the distribution of information.
At the same time, in those early stages of development, capitalism as a politico-economic project kept a profound link with its religio-cultural partner, Protestant Christianity. Central to both of them was the discourse of possessive individualism. What was the first copyrighted book? The Bible, of course.
Read the rest of the text at BTurn magazine.
(by Vuksa Velickovic)
