Sharing in spirit: Kopimism and the digital Eucharist

Aram Sinnreich*

Rutgers University SC&I, 4 Huntington St., New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA

(Received 12 December 2014; accepted 25 March 2015)

Kopimism, a new religion ofcially recognized by Sweden in 2012, is based on the principlesthat copying, disseminating and reconguring information are not only ethically right, but alsoare in themselves sacred acts of devotion. Kopimist philosophy also holds that the internet isholy and that code is law (a phrase copied from legal scholar Lawrence Lessig). Kopimismhas already raised some interesting questions and debates in both legal and religious circles.Some grumble that the Kopimists are a bunch of pirates using religious protection toshield them from copyright liability. Others suggest that the religion is little more than asophomoric rhetorical exercise, the predictable product of a precocious young philosopher.In this article, I suggest that, if we take Kopimist doctrine at its word, we can betterunderstand it as the crystallization of an emerging value system centred around theproliferation of digital, networked information. Like copyright, and monastic Christianitybefore it, Kopimism stakes out a socioepistemological vantage point, contrasting theregulatory demands of the twentieth-century copyright regime with todays globalizeddigital culture. Based on interviews with Kopimist ofcials and worshippers, as well as acritical reading of the religions constitution and other doctrinal texts, I delineate many ofthe ethical boundaries surrounding this new belief system, and examine it in contrast tosome previous religious and legal systems, evaluating its points of continuity and rupture toilluminate the unique challenges to ethics and morality in an era of information abundanceand continuing material and educational inequity.

Keywords: Kopimism; copyright; religion; digital culture; media ethics; sharing

The only thing we can do as Christians now, I suppose,is to do what Jesus tried doing and do it better.- Isak Gerson1

Introduction: a religion for the networked age

In April 2012, a young couple got married in Belgrade, Serbia. The wedding video shows thebride and groom smiling nervously as they stand on a dais in fancy clothes, while the crowdaround them titters and cheers and the romantic strains of an aria waft through the air. Afterthe groom lifts the brides veil, they exchange heartfelt vows and then kiss. The room eruptswith applause.

2015 Taylor & Francis

*Email: aramsinnreich@gmail.com

Information, Communication & Society, 2015http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2015.1036766

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Despite these traditional elements, this was no ordinary wedding. For one thing, the youngcouple were dressed in a postmodern mlange of styles: the groom offset his brocaded coat, leg-gings and neck ruff by dying his short hair maraschino cherry red, while the bride wore a oor-length dress that was white on the left and black on the right with black breast cones and a singleelbow-length black silk glove on her right arm. Far more striking was the ofciant to their right: inaddition to his conservative black cassock, augmented by a grey and gold stole, he wore a GuyFawkes mask and sported a laptop emblazoned with stickers. The laptop was evidently the sourceof the ofciants voice, which in its computer-generated cadences asked each party to take theother as a noble peer and to share your love, your knowledge, and your feelings as long asthe information exists.2

These vows had never been spoken before, because this was the rst marriage ever conductedin the Church of Kopimism, a new religion conceived by members of the Swedish copyright acti-vist group Piratbyrn and technically founded in 2010 by a 19-year-old philosophy student namedIsak Gerson. The religion is based on the principles that copying, disseminating and reconguringinformation are not only ethically right but also are in themselves sacred acts of devotion.According to the Kopimist Constitution (First United Church of Kopimism, US, n.d.), Kopimistphilosophy also holds that the internet is holy and that code is law (a phrase brazenly copiedfrom the legal scholar Lawrence Lessig (1999)).

Like nearly every social and cultural development in the internet era, Kopimisms rise hasbeen documented, analyzed, criticized and cheered by a cavalcade of commenters from the main-stream media to political message boards to Internet Relay Chat (IRC) chat rooms. Yet its originsand current status are still shrouded in a certain degree of mystery.

In 2003, a group of Swedish political activists and cultural pranksters calling themselvesPiratbyrn (the Piracy Bureau) set up shop and launched the now-infamous le sharing website The Pirate Bay. Two years later, Piratbyrn member Ibrahim Botani designed the Kopimi(pronounced copy me) logo, a stylized, blocky letter K intended to serve as the antithesis ofa copyright or trademark symbol (Romig, 2012). According to Kopimi.com, a site launchedthe same year, the symbol shows that you want to be copied, and is intended for use on home-pages or blogs, in books, in software, as sound logos in music or whatever.

In the following years, The Pirate Bay drew international criticism and acclaim, as wellas a high-prole prosecution that ended in 2010 with jail sentences and hefty nes forseveral founders.3 At the same time, its ideological sibling The Pirate Party, a fullyedged political organization that shared its roots in Piratbyrn, continued to grow in pro-minence and inuence, winning seats in several national and European elections from2006 to the present. It was in the midst of The Pirate Bay trial and the Pirate Partys ascen-sion that Gerson registered Kopimism as an ofcially recognized religion with the Swedishgovernment.

Kopimism does not seem to have existed in either theory or practice prior to its registrationwith the Swedish government. As European Parliament Minister, Kopimist theologian andSwedish Pirate Party ofcial Christian Engstrm told me,

The religion of Kopimism was originally a joke. One of the lawyers who was prosecuting the PirateBay said on some occasion, you pirates, youre like some sort of religious sect. Someone thought itwas funny and said Oh yeah, were Kopimists. A year or two later, someone got it registered as anofcial religion.4

Though it may have originated as a joke, Engstrm told me he soon became more and moreserious in it, as did Gerson and several others. Sweden ofcially recognized the religion inJanuary 2012, and after the raft of media attention that followed, its membership grew rapidly,

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reaching 8500 in the next six months. Today, there are chapters in over a dozen countries(Koebler, 2012), and a growing library of theological texts devoted to the religion.

What are we to make of a religion that started as a joke, with a founder still in his collegeyears, in the light of its state recognition, its avid membership and its expanding doctrinal litera-ture? Is it mere pranksterism, a piece of absurdist political theater taken to its logical extremes forthe sake of deadpan humor? Is it a hoax, designed to tweak the medias appetite for spectacle or tobypass the strictures of copyright law? Or can we understand it as an authentic belief system, withthe ideological integrity and consistency, as well as the ritualistic and institutional hallmarks, thatwe typically expect from legitimate religions?

Though the available facts certainly support the rst two interpretations, I argue in this articlethat the third view is equally valid, and that Kopimism offers the rudiments of a belief systemuniquely suited to the epistemological qualities of information and social organization in the net-worked age. I also argue that, despite its supercial novelty, Kopimist thought echoes both Chris-tian and pagan themes in ways that strategically afrm its doctrinal lineage while subverting thedominance of copyright law by recasting it as merely a competing religion with diametricallyopposed values.

My analysis is based on two sources of data: scriptural texts, both Kopimist and traditional,and direct interviews, conducted via a range of media, with Kopimist ofcials, theologians andpractitioners. Although the former are most often analyzed exegetically, and the latter ethnogra-phically, the current project investigates the relationships between texts, laws and value systemsacross a range of doctrines and ideologies via discursive analysis. I employ this technique, asscholars such as Nye (2000), Scott (2003), Anjum (2007), and Crawley (2014) have employed,as a means to identify and critique the resonances between these diverse belief systems and modesof expression, and to connect these resonances to broader vectors of identity and power withinsociety at large.

This approach is also ideal given that several of my sources, interviewed via IRC, chose toremain anonymous or pseudonymous, which limits the possibility of interpreting their responsesthrough biographic or cultural lters; even basic demographic information about them, such asage and gender, is unavailable. This leaves only the discursive aspects of their statements, andthe virtually negligible metadata regarding their engagement with the communication platform,as legible data as for analysis. Here, again, I rely upon existing literature to demonstrate thevalue of such a methodology; Schwarzs (2014) work on anonymous le sharers, which drawsexplicitly on Boltanski and Thvenots (2006) analysis of discursive resources and strategies,provides an excellent case in point. Ultimately, my aim is not to argue that Kopimism servesas a unifying doctrine for a specic community or society, but rather that it serves a broad andsomewhat diverse range of stakeholders by providing an alternative and explicitly critical ethical framework for information sharing in the face of the hegemonic, global(izing) discourseof copyright maximalism.

Sophistry, scam or sacrament?

There are ample reasons to chalk Kopimism up to mere sophistry, or to dismiss it as an overblownjoke with a lame punch line. The fact that the religion was founded by a teen-aged philosophystudent, the absurd pageantry of its wedding ritual and its uninching celebration of the internet le sharing, specically as a sacred instrument have all contributed to its public image as acarnival act more deserving of derision than exegesis.

A closer examination of Kopimisms sacred texts offer even more support for this interpret-ation. One such text, a document improbably titled POwr, Broccoli and KOPIMI contains manyexamples of sophomoric humour. The book suggests that its words should bite rmly into you

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and your mom. It exhorts followers to Experiment with research chemicals, Give yourself cultstatus and Be careful of burning kittens (The Pirate Bay, 2009). There is, in short, little questionthat the religions theologians, ofciants and followers have a taste or, at least a tolerance forthe absurd.

Furthermore, Kopimism shares a certain snarky tone with other recent cultural movements,born of online and mass media culture, that lay claim to spiritual legitimacy and legal religiousprotection what Cusack (2010) calls invented religions. These include Pastafarianism(Walach, 2008) and Jediism (McCormick, 2006; Possamai, 2011), both of which may be under-stood explicitly as rejections of organized religion and, especially in the case of Pastafarianism, ofthe very premise of religion as an ontological system (though other functions and interpretationsapply, as well).

Yet, none of these facts necessarily presents a challenge to the authenticity of Kopimistdoctrine or the fervour of its adherents. The prophets behind some of todays largest religionswere themselves young and/or eccentric (the list includes dissident carpenters, wealthy ascetics,alleged swindlers and science ction authors), many of whom make Gerson look downright staidby comparison. The rituals associated with these religions are often equally or more bizarre in theeyes of nonbelievers, incorporating features such as amboyant clothing, speaking-in-tonguesand genital mutilation. And the apparent absurdity of religion, for better or worse, has beenacknowledged for eons, from Jobs complaint that his belief in god made him a laughingstock(Job 12:4, English Standard Version) to Martin Luthers celebration of laughter as an indicator ofand prerequisite for religious faith (Plass, 1959, p. 692). Finally, in contrast to some otherinvented religions such as Pastafarianism, Kopimism functions as more than just a rhetoricalgambit, a reductio ad absurdum whose only, or primary, function is to undermine the socialgravity and centrality of established religion. To the contrary, as I will argue below, Kopimistthought elucidates a fairly coherent world view, and its rituals and lexicon (such as they are)stake out a proactive ethical stance, rather than a reactive dismissal of other such belief systems.

Another charge routinely levelled at Kopimism is the notion that it is a scam providing apatina of religious and legal legitimacy to fundamentally immoral, anti-social behaviours. A2011 article about Kopimism on an America Online (AOL) blog was headlined Swedish FileSharers Get Religious About Stealing (OBrien, 2011). Similarly, a 2012 post on the inuentialChristian blog Patheos complained that Kopimists are seeking the legal protections given to reli-gion so that they can pirate music, movies and the like with impunity. And when they are prose-cuted for internet piracy they can claim religious persecution! (Veith, 2012). PC Worlds Dvorak(2012) penned perhaps the most scathing condemnation, writing that Swedens ofcial recog-nition of Kopimism has hoax written all over it, and sarcastically suggesting other screwballideas might include a Church of Porn or a Church of the Holy Burglary. Even more sympath-etic coverage, such as a 2012 New Yorker article, suggests that, while Kopimism may be rooted indeeply held conviction, it can still be understood as just a bit of political theatre or an activistprank (Romig, 2012). Similarly, Techdirt, a popular blog that is typically critical of copyrightmaximalism and sympathetic to pirate politics, has argued that the religion does not accomplishmuch beyond being a little publicity stunt (Masnick, 2012).

Unlike the accusations of sophistry, the claims that Kopimism amounts to an elaborate hoaxhave little to support them. As Engstrm told me, its totally not a scam. No amount of money hasever changed hands, and it wouldnt work to prevent prosecution. While it is not clear whetherthis legal premise has yet been tested, Kopimist spokespeople have repeatedly told the press theydo not expect immunity from prosecution for le sharing, and several news articles (Solon, 2012;Sweden Recognizes, 2012) have argued that such immunity does not exist under current law.

As to the claim that Kopimism is just a bit of political theatre, I would take issue with themodier just. Based on Engstrms and Gersons accounts, there seems little doubt that the

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religion owes at least some of its origins to a Situationist-style act of dtournement (Debord &Wolman, 1956/2006), exposing copyright as a legally enforced ideological instrument by refutingit through an act of legally sanctioned ideology. Yet, it is also apparent that Kopimism has trans-cended beyond religion-as-spectacle to something more integral and organic, with a coherent setof moral and ethical principles and an emerging set of sacred texts and rituals.

The meaning and ethics of copying

As any social historian can attest to, the line separating religion from politics is always permeableand contingent, and there is little question that Kopimisms ethical foundations are rooted in thesame resistance to copyright law and celebration of the free ow of digital information that shapethe Pirate Partys political agenda. As Engstrm told me, I do think theres a pirate ideology, andKopimism is a way of expressing it in religious terms. Similarly, Gerson told me that its veryhard to draw a line between religion and politics. I see them as being two faces of the same coin.5

Yet Kopimism is not merely a restatement of pirate politics, dressed in more sanctimoniousclothing. The belief system, though still inchoate, bases its moral precepts on a fundamentallyspiritual understanding of information and its role in human affairs, and draws some nuancedethical guidelines around the acts of producing and disseminating information. As Gerson,who said he identies as a Christian and a Kopimist, explained, we need to speak of somethingholy in order to describe it, because its that big of a deal.

The most rudimentary aspect of Kopimism is the precept that information is sacred. As theKopimist Constitution explains, there is an intrinsic value of information, We ascribe thisvalue to all information irrespective of its content. In A Kopimist Gospel, a theological textposted to his blog, Engstrm (2013, p. 2) explores this concept further, elaborating on thepremise that, because the universe is comprised of information, and because life is dened bythe copying of information, the celebration and reproduction of information by humans is anact of godliness. In his own, more poetic words:

In ways and for reasons that remain to be explored, the ribosomes appeared, who could copy. This wasthe beginning of Life. We therefore see Copying as the rst manifestation of the Divine Spirit.

Other Kopimists have reafrmed this belief, as well. As one Kopimist, participating on the#telecomix IRC channel (which is devoted to free speech on the internet), told me, kopimi isthe natural state of the universe.

This belief is expressed by Kopimists via a devotional act called kopyacting. As Gersonexplained to an interviewer from The New Scientist, We have a part of our religious practiceswhere we worship the value of information by copying it (George, 2012). According to the Kopi-mist Constitution, this act amounts to a duty for all devout: Participants are encouraged to copy,remix and distribute, as expressed in the Missionary Church of Kopimism values, MissionaryMessage and Constitution, as much information between each other as possible.

Another, related precept that characterizes Kopimist thought is the notion that, due to its fun-damental role in our own existence and consciousness, information is a birthright for all people.This principle is described in its simplest terms on the front page of the Kopimism website (http://kopimistsamfundet.se/english), which states that All people should have access to all infor-mation produced. This fundamental human right is also viewed from the reverse direction, asa right inhering to information itself:

Information a dual [sic] of matter is intangible, inexhaustible, and illuminating. As matter wants tofall, information wants to be free. Kopimism takes advantage of these sacred (God given) properties ofreality for the benet of humanity. (Sudoroom.org, n.d.)

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This precept quotes, and builds upon (or as Kopimists, would say, copymixes6) the notionthat information wants to be free, a phrase typically attributed to internet community pioneerStuart Brand (Wagner, 2003) and popular among internet freedom advocates. Yet, while mostpeople who use the phrase probably think of it as a metaphorical scientic conceit (as inwater seeks its own level), Kopimism appears to treat the term anthropomorphically, ascribinga degree of agency and consciousness to information itself.

The ip side of this precept is the notion that restricting the ow of information is equivalentto a crime against humanity. The Kopimist Constitution, for instance, argues that To keep sourcecode [for software] hidden from others is comparable to slavery, and that intellectual property(IP) laws are egregious violations of our intellectual sovereignty and freedom. Clearly, this isa very different critique of IP laws and proprietary software policies than those which are typicallymounted by free software and copyright reform advocates; instead of political and economic argu-ments based on reasoned analysis, these are moral declarations rooted in passionate faith.

A third precept, to which I alluded briey above, is the notion that altering, combining oradding to information is more godly, and therefore more virtuous, than merely reproducing itin its original form. As the Kopimist Constitution argues, Copymixing is a sacred kind ofcopying, moreso than the perfect, digital copying, because it expands and enhances the existingwealth of information. This logic would seem to y in the face of critics who view Kopimistdogma as merely a legitimizing screen for peer-to-peer le sharing. To the devout, remixing aHarry Potter movie is far superior to merely sharing the unaltered video le.

Engstrm (2013) explicitly connects this philosophical premise to the genesis of life itself. Ashe argues in his Gospel,

Sex is Kopying, and a tribute to the Fundamental Principle that has given Kopimism its name. Theultimate purpose of sex is to pass on the miracle of life by producing new individuals. Sexual repro-duction is not about making identical copies, but about remixing, which we see as the highest form ofcopying.

Despite Kopimisms belief in the intrinsic value of information and the sanctity of copying,there are some instances in which Kopimists believe information should remain unshared. Themost important example is the notion of personal privacy, which is conceived as a fundamentalright. The Kopimism website states unequivocally that It is a direct sin to monitor and eavesdropon people. The Kopimist Constitution extends this protective halo to all of its liturgical spacesand practices, and admonishes followers to obscure their communications via encryption: It isimportant that no monitoring or recording of worship activities takes place. Because of societysvicious legislative and litigous [sic] persecution of Kopimists, participants in the service areexpected to encrypt their trafc.

Kopimists emphasis on the freedom of information may seem to conict directly with theirbelief in privacy and secrecy. Yet adherents seem to feel comfortable navigating these apparentlyirreconcilable values. For instance, a Kopimist from the Czech Republic named Nick Wao, withwhom I chatted in the #telecomix IRC channel, explained to me that I think personal informationare NOT part of koppimism to be right, if are some data private, they shouldnt be copied, Ialso respect privacy of data [sic].

Another Kopimist, who participates in the #kopimi IRC channel, agreed that the two preceptsdo seem to be contradictory. Yet he or she told me that I sort of came to my on conclusion onwhat they mean by all information, I believe they are speaking on public information about theworld, and not the private information of a person I could be wrong [sic].

As is evident from these remarks, Kopimist theologians and practitioners are actively engagedin a continuing dialogue regarding the moral delineations of information sharing. While privacy is

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one of the major exceptions to the totalizing treatment of information within Kopimist ideology,there are others, as well. As Gerson acknowledged in an interview with Baraniuk (2012), infor-mation may be categorized in terms that confer greater value or primacy upon one bit than uponanother, but as for making distinctions, he only commented, We have discussions that occurinternally.

Some of these internal conversations take place via the IRC channels I cited above. I askedparticipants on these channels whether certain kinds of information sharing were sinful or holy namely, (a) the wholesale surveillance of personal communications by intelligence agencies suchas the National Security Agency; (b) revenge porn in which an ex-lover will share explicitphotos and videos without consent of the subject and (c) nuclear launch codes.

Kopimists offered thoughtful, nuanced responses to these hypothetical scenarios. A #teleco-mix participant told me that the difference between good and bad information sharing can ulti-mately be reduced to a question of the sharers motivations. leaked data for kopimists will getkopied if it provides for useful discussion or change, we facilitate communication infrastructurefor passage of datalove, he or she told me.7 people who want your browser history or to sharenude pictures have different motives. Youll see that most of the kopimist sites have a very clearbias towards data that general use useful to many [sic]. Along similar lines, a #kopimi participantexplained that the social impact of information sharing is crucial to its ethical calculus: publicinformation sharing in general is a benet to society, and the information sharing of private indi-viduals against their will, is detrimental to society.

What is perhaps most striking about these replies is the degree of responsibility that is con-ferred on an individual to make moral and ethical judgements in the absence of clear guidelines.nuclear launch codes wont be copied by people, because no one want [sic] launch it, Waoasserted. And if you think [revenge porn] is part of knowledge that someone needs to know,yes you should share it, he told me. These opinions demonstrate that Kopimism is, for manyof its devotees, the furthest thing from either absurdist spectacle or criminal hoax. To the contrary,it is a value system that, in its simplicity, community and clarity of purpose, allows people livingin information-rich environments to make complex ethical decisions with a moral focus that is notaddressed by traditional religions and not prioritized by todays conicting and often politicizedlegal codes (Patry, 2011; Sinnreich, 2013; Vaidhyanathan, 2003). According to ChristopherCarmean, founder of the First United Church of Kopimism in the United States, this independenceis precisely the religions purpose. In his words, Kopimism does not dictate where these linesshould be drawn. We hope to empower people to become their own masters and to decidewhat is right and wrong for themselves (Carmean, 2012).

This fact brings some context to the nal precept to emerge from Kopimist dogma: namely,the premise that the laws of the state are inferior to, and often irrelevant to, the moral judgementsof the religion and its adherents. The mistrust of and contempt for legal strictures is evident acrossa broad range of Kopimist texts. The Kopimism website proclaims simply that Information tech-nology is not to be feathered [presumably a typo for fettered] by laws. The Kopimist credoencourages followers to adhere to the following principles, among others:

. I do not copyright my work nor patent my inventions, but publish them in the publicdomain unless I wish to keep them private.

. I demand the right to copy/modify/publish/implement any information presented to me foranyone who wants it (Sudoroom.org, n.d.)

And the Kopimist Constitution does not merely encourage adherents to out the rule of law,but actively encourages clergy (Ops) to play a role in turning public sentiment against restrictivelaws: Ops should drive public opinion against invasive surveillance and the laws that limit

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information dissemination, copying, and remixing (deceptively referred to as intellectual propertylaws).

Finally, Kopimists appear to take nearly as dim a view of religious dogma as they do of otherforms of codied ideology. With their emphasis on self-directed moral judgement and their fun-damental mistrust of xed, written codes, adherents tend to question even the letters of their ownlaws. As a #kopimi participant explained to me during our IRC chat, kopimism declares things tobe holy, and sacred, yet these words are meaningless abstractions designed to encapsulateideas to mean more than what they truly do putting lipstick on pigs [sic]. Far from feelingthreatened by this resistance, Gerson told me that scepticism of moral authority is one of hisown core values: I feel a general distrust against religious organizations where you have a cul-tural elite that decides what the others should think the philosophers of a religious group shouldbe everyone.

Kopimisms doctrinal lineage

With its declaration that the internet is holy, its celebration of technologies like peer-to-peer lesharing and data encryption, and its active rejection of copyright law, Kopimism is very much areligion rooted in contemporary networked global culture. Yet POwr, Broccoli and KOPIMIsituates the religion within the longer continuum of human culture, claiming that the religion isseeded in prehistory [and] rooted in the future (Pirate Bay, 2009).

Most Kopimist texts do not elaborate on what this seeding in prehistory consists of, beyondbroad existential claims to continuity with the birth of the universe and the origins of life. Yet,Gerson was a philosophy student at Uppsala University when he founded Kopimism, andmany of its theologians and adherents are clearly familiar with Western religious and legalhistory. Despite its futuristic novelty, the religion clearly draws signicant inuence from pastbelief systems.

Many scholars and cultural commentators have wondered why Sweden specically hasbecome a locus for pirate culture in the twenty-rst century, producing the Piratbyrn andits three offspring, The Pirate Bay, the Pirate Party and Kopimism. Perhaps, the most thoroughtreatment of the subject is Patrick Burkarts. In his book Pirate Politics: The New InformationPolicy Contests, Burkart (2014) answers the question Why Sweden? with a variety of hypoth-eses. To summarize his exhaustively researched and compellingly argued chapter on the subject,Swedens unique combination of high communications technology penetration and computer lit-eracy, a thriving hacker subculture, political and social tolerance for marginal groups, liberal jur-isdictional system and commons-oriented approach to the physical environment all playimportant roles.

This last point seems especially compelling as a cultural explanatory factor; as Burkartnotes, the Swedish practice of allemansrtten, or right of public access known as everymans right to roam and camp in the countryside, combined with our contemporary viewof cyberspace as a virtual topography, logically lends itself to a model of the networked infor-mation sphere as a space for all comers, a terrain in which it is every users right to copy, pasteand remix the cultural archive. Gerson, an avid hiker, conrmed this connection explicitly whenI raised it. As he explained to me, the allemansrtten is creating a commons, which is also whatwe want to do through copying. We want information and knowledge and culture to be acommons.8

Yet I believe there is another factor at play here as well a religious precept that predated andpossibly informed these other factors. In the Poetic Edda, a collection of ancient poems that formsthe basis of Scandinavian mythology and the contemporary cultures that are built upon it, Odin,rst among the gods, discovers written language while hanging from the World Tree, a bloody

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sacrice by himself, and to himself. In verse, Odin describes the wonderment he felt on makingthis discovery:

Well-being I wonAnd wisdom too.I grew and took joy in my growth:From a word to a wordI was led to a word,From a deed to another deed.

Thus, for Scandinavian cultures, the very denition of wisdom and well-being originates in theability to encode and decode information, in the ability to traverse the informatic landscapefrom a word to a word.

Of course, pagan religions were not the only ones to play a role in shaping Scandinavianculture. Even at the time the Poetic Edda was written, around the turn of the thirteenth century,Sweden was in the process of becoming ofcially Christianized a designation that remainedmore or less intact until the Church of Sweden, a Lutheran denomination, ceased to be thenations state religion in 2000. There are several aspects of Christian dogma that may be under-stood as precursors to Kopimism, which I will review briey below.

First, the sacred valence of copying and sharing in Kopimism bears more than a passingresemblance to the knowledge regimes that characterized monastic Christian principles and prac-tices. For instance, St. Irenaeus, a second-century theologian, would append to his texts a formuladictating the terms on which they should be copied:

You who will transcribe this book, I charge you, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and of His glor-ious Second Coming, in which He will come to judge the living and dead, compare what you havecopied against the original and correct it carefully. Furthermore, transcribe this adjuration andplace it in the copy. (Monastery of Christ, n.d.)

This protocol was in turn copied by St. Jerome 200 years later in his work De viris illustribus,and, based on that work, the formula continued to be used by monks well into the Middle Ages,whenever they transcribed holy scriptures.

In the centuries that followed, the act of copying texts was considered a devotional practice formany monastic traditions, and was not limited to Judeo-Christian source materials. Reformers andinnovators such as St. Pachomius (292348), Cassidorus (485585) and St. Boethius (480525)all emphasized the sacred duty of copying in their life and work, and the latter two played impor-tant roles in ensuring that Hellenic and Roman texts, as well as contemporary works of secularphilosophy, were preserved by Christian scribes.

I am not suggesting that the spirit of copying is identical in Monastic Christianity and Kopi-mism; where the former was principally concerned with maintaining copy delity, better to trans-mit the word of God or the wisdom of the ancients, the latter is more concerned with copying forits own sake and privileges interpretation over delity. Yet these distinctions are not so great asthey may seem. Monastic Christianity, copyright and Kopimism can each be understood as valuesystems that govern socio-epistemological processes (in plain English, the social establishment oftruth) during the eras of informatic scarcity, mechanical reproduction and digital dematerializa-tion, respectively. Seen through this lens, a doctrine like Kopimism can be understood as a seriousattempt to reconcile the regulatory demands of the twentieth-century copyright regime with thecultural ramications of todays global digital information infrastructure. Put another way,while copyright laws sacrice technological innovation to preserve industrial capitalism,

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Kopimist doctrine sacrices industrial capitalism to preserve technological innovation. Thus, theKopimism website is completely accurate when it states that Copyright Religion is our absoluteopposite.Gerson openly acknowledges this lineage as well. Inside Christian discourse, there hasalways been this line of conict related to information, he told me. This is something that hasaffected our political systems and our history a lot.

AnotherChristian tradition thatmaybeunderstood as an antecedent toKopimism is logos theol-ogy, rooted in the belief that God created theworld through the act of speaking it into existence. Theapotheosis of this belief is in John 1:1, typically translated into English as In the beginning was theWord, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. Yet the Greek term logos ()employed by John has a number of possible interpretations other than Word, and a long historyof philosophical debate accompanies its interpretation in any language, includingGreek. Some scho-lars see the origin of the concept as Platonic, relating to his notion of logos (more often interpreted inEnglish as logic) as the instrument by which humans may glimpse the contours of the world ofperfect forms that hovers just beyond the limits of our senses and sensibilities (Louth, 2007).

Other scholars emphasize the linguistic dimensions of logos in Christian scripture, interpretingour powers to communicate as derivatives of Gods voice in the act of creation. These scholars,includingKarl Barth and other avatars ofmodern European Protestantism (the direct precursor, his-torically, toKopimism), view it as our shared duty as humans to use our voices to proclaim theWordof God in essence, to continue the breath of creation throughout the entirety of our lives. Thisaccomplishes the dual task of spreading Christian ideology to the uninitiated and of continuallyrecreating the world through our access to Gods creative linguistic power.9

To me, the Barthian perspective seems especially relevant to Kopimism. In both cases, infor-mation and communication are seen as the constituent processes underpinning creation. In bothcases, spreading information is seen as a sacred duty continuing Gods work on Earth, to put it indoctrinal terms. And, at a deeper level, Barthian thought and Gersonian thought (to coin a phrase)both exhibit a healthy mistrust of modern liberalism, or the elevation of the individual to theprimary unit of social action and analysis. To be sure, as I have discussed above, Kopimisminvests its followers with a signicant amount of moral agency and gives individual decisionsprimacy over both legal and scriptural dictates. But the aim is to escape liberalism, not to reinforceit. As Gerson, who is a columnist for the progressive Christian opinion site Dagens Seglora, haswritten, he views Holy Communion as his theological starting point (Gerson, 2012), and con-siders it to be the

rst step in building a radical Christian identity against individualism that way, we can become onethrough the body of Christ. But only when we have razed the society that divides us to the ground [canwe] build a new society on top of it. (Gerson, 2013a)

This brings Gersons consecration of peer-to-peer le sharing into sharp focus. His under-standing of online information sharing is fundamentally Eucharistic in nature; to him,

the breaking of bread is not only a symbol of unity but the sharing of food is also a literal way ofloving thy neighbor. That we all share the same bread means that we are all part of the sameworld, the same system. (Gerson, 2012)

In conversation, he expanded on this theme specically as it relates to the emerging networkedsociety. In his words:

Through sharing, we become one mind with several parts. We are individuals, in a kind of collectivebeing. Our minds become connected in this big distribution network: You cant really say where one

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mind stops and another mind begins. And its not just relations between people, its between peopleand machines, too.

Conclusion

Kopimism, a religion that began as a joke according to its own founders, is widely interpreted asat best an act of political theater and at worst a criminal insult to genuine faith. Yet in the few shortyears since its creation, its theologians and growing ranks of followers around the world havebegun to develop a set of moral and ethical precepts and practices that help them to navigatecomplex questions of personal agency, power and identity in globalized, post-industrial, net-worked society.

Though the contours of Kopimism are still fuzzy and riddled with contradictions and ellipses,it already offers some believers answers and solutions that older belief systems cannot provide. AsEngstrm told me, part of the appeal is simply that Kopimism does not require its adherents toignore or overlook scientic explanations of reality. In his words, I also feel so unsatised byall the old religions the old religions are not really up to scratch. Theyre completely incompa-tible with science if you read them literally. Engstrm is not alone in this regard; Sweden is bysome measures the most atheist/agnostic nation in the world, with as many as 85% of the popu-lation falling into the nonbeliever category (Zuckerman, 2007). When New York Times reporterJohn Tagliabue (2012) asked Gerson himself whether he believes in God, he answered No, I justbelieve in our values. Its just a belief in holy values.10

Yet there is little question that these holy values amount to more than mere political convic-tion or adolescent antiauthoritarianism. When Kopimist dogma calls on its followers to continu-ously mock and ridicule all aspects of copyright (Pirate Bay, 2009), the commandment givesvoice to a sense of moral outrage, and spurs collective action, against the ravages of industrialcapitalism and Western cultural hegemony. Though he may not believe in God as a reiedconcept or an institutionally sanctioned deity, Gerson is avowedly a Christian in the purestsense of the word, seeking a means to transcend the pettiness and corruption of human affairsthrough a communion with his fellow humans, and with the cosmos at large. As he argued inDagens Seglora:

When we allow money to wield its power over our wealth and each other, we sell out the kingdom ofGod to other lords.What can we do instead? We can build up congregations and communitieswithout coins, where rich and poor likewise are allowed space and where all are rich on common prop-erty. (Gerson, 2013b)

Though this philosophy also has the distinct ring of Libertarian Marxism, it echoes many ofthe same themes without retaining either its fundamental antipathy towards religion (obviously)or its foundations in a class-based, materialist conception of social dynamics. Ultimately, it is notjust the class system or industrial capitalism that Kopimism seeks to overthrow, but the entirefreight of Western liberal thought. When POwr, Broccoli and KOPIMI announces at theoutset that the book youre about to read has no author, no designer, no typesetter, no distributionchannel (Pirate Bay, 2009), it is intentionally jettisoning the individual baby with the industrialbathwater. No Kopimist is wholly self sufcient, the Kopimist Constitution argues, echoingDonne, each being just one component of an interconnected and interdependent world.

Donne penned his Meditation XVII in 1623, just as colonization and industrialization werecombining to enmesh the globe in a new world order, and as thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes,Ren Descartes and Francis Bacon were building the philosophical foundations of modern liberal-ism and empiricism. Donnes work can be viewed as a form of poetic inoculation, a reminder that

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the new language of individual rights and responsibilities, like the invisible suffering of factoryworkers and plantation slaves, obscured a deeper truth: namely, that we are all connected, allpart of a single organism, that we are all involved in mankind.

Kopimism comes at the close of this era and the dawn of a new one, bearing the samemessage. In its vision of communal property and unconditional datalove, it harkens back nos-talgically to a time before the mania of the marketplace recongured our inner and outer lives inits own image. Yet in its embrace of digital technology and its vision of the globe as a network ofnoble peers, it also looks forward, with clearer eyes than most. One only needs to skim the tra-jectory of technological development to realize that the pace of change will soon contribute todrastic alterations in our social order, our cultural mores, our bodies and our consciousnessitself.11 As the networks around us and within us grow more complex, more robust andcapable of processing geometrically greater volumes of information and power with everypassing year, the threat of subjugation and the opportunity for liberation will grow as well.Some will nd the hope for liberation in reforming laws and renewing the social contract,while others will seek their independence through technological prowess. Kopimists havecharted another path, as Donne did: by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security.

Copy and seed.

Disclosure statementNo potential conict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes1. Quotation is from Gerson (2014). This and all Swedish articles were rst translated by Google Trans-

late and then corrected by Linn Ahlbom.2. The wedding video is available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYAiZ-L4gXg3. At the time of writing, there are continuing legal and police actions against The Pirate Bay, including a

recent raid and seizure of the sites internet servers.4. All direct quotes from Engstrm, unless otherwise cited, are from a personal communication via tele-

phone, 22 November 2013.5. All direct quotes from Gerson, unless otherwise cited, are from a personal communication via tele-

phone, 16 May, 2014.6. The word copy, both discretely and as part of larger compound words, is sometimes spelled with a k

in Kopimist texts. For the present article, I rely on the most prevalent spellings, except within thecontext of specic quotations.

7. Datalove is a concept embraced by Kopimists and #telecomix members that refers to the develop-ment of intimacy and empathy through the act of sharing information.

8. It should be noted that the legal freedom to roam is not unique to Sweden; similar codes can be foundthroughout Northern Europe and other parts of the world. Nor is it in any way ancient; rather, as Wik-torsson (1996) observes, it is arguably a thoroughly modern concept.

9. I am neither a religious scholar nor an expert in Christianity. Consequently, I have relied upon theexpertise and generosity of the scholars Harry Bruinius and Max Lindenman for providing me withfeedback and suggestions during the writing of this article. I am grateful for their contributions.

10. The overwhelming prevalence of nonbelief in Sweden may seem, on the face of it, to contradict someof the basic claims of this article regarding the doctrinal roots of Kopimism. Yet, as a range of scholars(e.g. Bowpitt, 1998; Hout & Fischer, 2002; Mitchell, 1980; Vernon, 1968) have argued, a religiouslyunafliated individual may nonetheless share many ethical and moral values, and derive those values,from a prevalent religious tradition in his or her society or community.

11. Some scholars such as Badmington (2000), Bostrom (2005), Fukuyama (2003) and Hayles (2008)discuss these potentialities through the lens of posthumanism. While I acknowledge the value ofthis nomenclature, I also feel it should not be deployed without a degree of scrutiny and critiquethat exceeds the scope of this current article; hence, my choice is to avoid the terminology altogether.

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Notes on contributorDr Aram Sinnreich is an assistant professor at Rutgers Universitys School of Communication and Infor-mation, and author of the books Mashed Up (2010) and The Piracy Crusade (2013), both publishedby University of Massachusetts Press. [email: aramsinnreich@gmail.com].

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AbstractIntroduction: a religion for the networked ageSophistry, scam or sacrament?The meaning and ethics of copyingKopimism's doctrinal lineageConclusionDisclosure statementNotesNotes on contributorReferences