by Aram Sinnreich

February 10, 2015

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Kopimism, a new religion officially recognized by Sweden in 2012, is based on the principles that copying, disseminating and reconfiguring information are not only ethically right, but are in themselves “sacred” acts of devotion. Kopimist philosophy also holds that “the internet is holy” and that “code is law” (a phrase copied from legal scholar Lawrence Lessig).

Kopimism has 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 to shield them from copyright liability. Others suggest that the religion is little more than a sophomoric 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 better understand it as the crystallization of an emerging value system centered around the proliferation of digital, networked information. Like copyright, and monastic Christianity before it, Kopimism stakes out a socioepistemological vantage point, contrasting the regulatory demands of the twentieth-century copyright regime with today’s globalized digital culture.

Based on interviews with Kopimist officials and worshippers, as well as a critical reading of the religion’s “constitution” and other doctrinal texts, I delineate the ethical boundaries surrounding this new belief system, and examine it in contrast to previous religious and legal systems, evaluating its points of continuity and rupture to illuminate the unique challenges to ethics and morality in an era of information abundance and continuing material and educational inequity.

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

—Isak Gerson

In April 2012, a young couple got married in Belgrade, Serbia. The wedding video shows the bride and groom smiling nervously as they stand on a dais in fancy clothes, while the crowd around them titters and cheers and the romantic strains of an aria waft through the air. After the groom lifts the bride’s veil, they exchange heartfelt vows and then kiss. The room erupts with applause.

Despite these traditional elements, this was no ordinary wedding. For one thing, the young couple were dressed in a postmodern mélange of styles: the groom offset his brocaded coat, leggings and neck ruff by dying his short hair maraschino cherry red, while the bride wore a floor-length dress that was white on the left and black on the right with black breast cones and a single elbow-length black silk glove on her right arm. Far more striking was the officiant to their right: in addition to his conservative black cassock, augmented by a grey and gold stole, he wore a Guy Fawkes mask and sported a laptop emblazoned with stickers. The laptop was evidently the source of the officiant’s “voice,” which in its computer-generated cadences asked each party to take the other as a “noble peer” and to “share your love, your knowledge, and your feelings … as long as the information exists.”^[2]

These vows had never been spoken before, because this was the first marriage ever conducted in the Church of Kopimism, a new religion conceived by members of the Swedish copyright activist group Piratbyrån and technically founded in 2010 by a 19-year-old philosophy student named Isak Gerson. The religion is based on the principles that copying, disseminating and reconfiguring information are not only ethically right but also are in themselves “sacred” acts of devotion. According to the Kopimist Constitution, Kopimist philosophy also holds that “the internet is holy” and that “code is law” (a phrase brazenly copied from the legal scholar Lawrence Lessig).

Like nearly every social and cultural development in the internet era, Kopimism’s rise has been documented, analyzed, criticized and cheered by a cavalcade of commenters from the mainstream media to political message boards to Internet Relay Chat (IRC) chat rooms. Yet its origins and current status are still shrouded in a certain degree of mystery.

In 2003, a group of Swedish political activists and cultural pranksters calling themselves Piratbyrån (“the Piracy Bureau”) set up shop and launched the now-infamous file-sharing website The Pirate Bay. Two years later, Piratbyrån member Ibrahim Botani designed the Kopimi (pronounced “copy me”) logo, a stylized, blocky letter “K” intended to serve as the antithesis of a copyright or trademark symbol. According to Kopimi.com, a site launched the same year, the symbol shows that “you want to be copied,” and is intended for use “on homepages 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 well as a high-profile prosecution that ended in 2010 with jail sentences and hefty fines for several founders.^[3] At the same time, its ideological sibling The Pirate Party, a fully fledged political organization that shared its roots in Piratbyrån, continued to grow in prominence and influence, winning seats in several national and European elections from 2006 to the present. It was in the midst of The Pirate Bay trial and the Pirate Party’s ascension that Gerson registered Kopimism as an officially recognized religion with the Swedish government.

Kopimism does not seem to have existed in either theory or practice prior to its registration with the Swedish government. As European Parliament Minister, Kopimist theologian and Swedish Pirate Party official Christian Engström told me:

The religion of Kopimism was originally a joke. One of the lawyers who was prosecuting the Pirate Bay said on some occasion, “you pirates, you’re like some sort of religious sect.” Someone thought it was funny and said “Oh yeah, we’re Kopimists.” A year or two later, someone got it registered as an official religion.^[4]

Though it may have originated as a “joke,” Engström told me he soon “became more and more serious in it,” as did Gerson and several others. Sweden officially recognized the religion in January 2012, and after the raft of media attention that followed, its membership grew rapidly, reaching 8,500 in the next six months. Today, there are chapters in over a dozen countries 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 college years, in the light of its state recognition, its avid membership and its expanding doctrinal literature? Is it mere pranksterism, a piece of absurdist political theater taken to its logical extremes for the sake of deadpan humor? Is it a hoax, designed to tweak the media’s appetite for spectacle or to bypass the strictures of copyright law? Or can we understand it as an authentic belief system, with the ideological integrity and consistency, as well as the ritualistic and institutional hallmarks, that we typically expect from “legitimate” religions?

Though the available facts certainly support the first two interpretations, I argue in this article that the third view is equally valid, and that Kopimism offers the rudiments of a belief system uniquely suited to the epistemological qualities of information and social organization in the networked age. I also argue that, despite its superficial novelty, Kopimist thought echoes both Christian and pagan themes in ways that strategically affirm its doctrinal lineage while subverting the dominance of copyright law by recasting it as merely a competing religion with diametrically opposed 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 officials, theologians and practitioners. Although the former are most often analyzed exegetically, and the latter ethnographically, the current project investigates the relationships between texts, laws and value systems across a range of doctrines and ideologies via discursive analysis. I employ this technique as a means to identify and critique the resonances between these diverse belief systems and modes of expression, and to connect these resonances to broader vectors of identity and power within society at large.

This approach is also ideal given that several of my sources, interviewed via IRC, chose to remain anonymous or pseudonymous, which limits the possibility of interpreting their responses through biographic or cultural filters; even basic demographic information about them, such as age and gender, is unavailable. This leaves only the discursive aspects of their statements, and the virtually negligible metadata regarding their engagement with the communication platform, as legible data for analysis. Ultimately, my aim is not to argue that Kopimism serves as a unifying doctrine for a specific community or society, but rather that it serves a broad and somewhat diverse range of stakeholders by providing an alternative—and explicitly critical—ethical framework for information sharing in the face of the hegemonic, globalizing discourse of copyright maximalism.

There are ample reasons to chalk Kopimism up to mere sophistry, or to dismiss it as an overblown joke with a lame punch line. The fact that the religion was founded by a teen-aged philosophy student, the absurd pageantry of its wedding ritual and its unflinching celebration of the internet—file sharing, specifically—as a sacred instrument have all contributed to its public image as a carnival act more deserving of derision than exegesis.

A closer examination of Kopimism’s sacred texts offers even more support for this interpretation. One such text, a document improbably titled “POwr, Broccoli and KOPIMI,” contains many examples of sophomoric humour. The book suggests that its words “should bite firmly into you—and your mom.” It exhorts followers to “Experiment with research chemicals,” “Give yourself cult status” and “Be careful of burning kittens.” There is, in short, little question that the religion’s theologians, officiants and followers have a taste—or, at least a tolerance—for the 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 religious protection—what Carole Cusack calls “invented religions.” These include Pastafarianism and Jediism, both of which may be understood explicitly as rejections of organized religion and, especially in the case of Pastafarianism, of the very premise of religion as an ontological system.

Yet none of these facts necessarily presents a challenge to the authenticity of Kopimist doctrine or the fervour of its adherents. The prophets behind some of today’s largest religions were themselves young and/or eccentric, many of whom make Gerson look downright staid by comparison. The rituals associated with these religions are often equally or more bizarre in the eyes of nonbelievers, incorporating features such as flamboyant clothing, speaking in tongues and genital mutilation. And the apparent absurdity of religion, for better or worse, has been acknowledged for eons, from Job’s complaint that his belief in God made him a “laughingstock” to Martin Luther’s celebration of laughter as an indicator of and prerequisite for religious faith. Finally, in contrast to some other “invented religions” such as Pastafarianism, Kopimism functions as more than just a rhetorical gambit, a reductio ad absurdum whose only, or primary, function is to undermine the social gravity and centrality of established religion. To the contrary, as I will argue below, Kopimist thought elucidates a fairly coherent worldview, and its rituals and lexicon 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 a patina of religious and legal legitimacy to fundamentally immoral, antisocial behaviours. A 2011 article about Kopimism on an AOL blog was headlined “Swedish File Sharers Get Religious About Stealing.” Similarly, a 2012 post on the influential Christian blog Patheos complained that Kopimists are “seeking the legal protections given to religion so that they can pirate music, movies and the like with impunity. And when they are prosecuted for internet piracy they can claim religious persecution!” PC World’s John Dvorak penned perhaps the most scathing condemnation, writing that Sweden’s official recognition of Kopimism “has hoax written all over it,” and sarcastically suggesting other “screwball ideas” might include a “Church of Porn” or a “Church of the Holy Burglary.” Even more sympathetic coverage, such as a 2012 New Yorker article, suggests that, while Kopimism may be rooted in “deeply held conviction,” it can still be understood as “just a bit of political theatre” or “an activist prank.” Similarly, Techdirt has argued that the religion does not accomplish “much beyond being a little publicity stunt.”

Unlike the accusations of sophistry, the claims that Kopimism amounts to an elaborate hoax have little to support them. As Engström told me, “it’s totally not a scam. No amount of money has ever changed hands, and it wouldn’t work to prevent prosecution.” While it is not clear whether this legal premise has yet been tested, Kopimist spokespeople have repeatedly told the press they do not expect immunity from prosecution for file sharing, and several news articles 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 the modifier “just.” Based on Engström’s and Gerson’s accounts, there seems little doubt that the religion owes at least some of its origins to a Situationist-style act of détournement, exposing copyright as a legally enforced ideological instrument by refuting it through an act of legally sanctioned ideology. Yet it is also apparent that Kopimism has transcended beyond religion-as-spectacle to something more integral and organic, with a coherent set of moral and ethical principles and an emerging set of sacred texts and rituals.

As any social historian can attest, the line separating religion from politics is always permeable and contingent, and there is little question that Kopimism’s ethical foundations are rooted in the same resistance to copyright law and celebration of the free flow of digital information that shape the Pirate Party’s political agenda. As Engström told me, “I do think there’s a pirate ideology, and Kopimism is a way of expressing it in religious terms.” Similarly, Gerson told me that “it’s very hard to draw a line between religion and politics. I see them as being two faces of the same coin.”

Yet Kopimism is not merely a restatement of pirate politics, dressed in more sanctimonious clothing. The belief system, though still inchoate, bases its moral precepts on a fundamentally spiritual understanding of information and its role in human affairs, and draws some nuanced ethical guidelines around the acts of producing and disseminating information. As Gerson, who said he identifies “as a Christian and a Kopimist,” explained, “we need to speak of something holy in order to describe it, because it’s that big of a deal.”

The most rudimentary aspect of Kopimism is the precept that information is sacred. As the Kopimist Constitution explains, there is an “intrinsic value of information. We ascribe this value to all information irrespective of its content.” In A Kopimist Gospel, Engström explores this concept further, elaborating on the premise that, because the universe is comprised of information, and because life is defined by the copying of information, the celebration and reproduction of information by humans is an act 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 was the beginning of Life. We therefore see Copying as the first manifestation of the Divine Spirit.

Other Kopimists have reaffirmed this belief. As one Kopimist, participating on the #telecomix IRC channel, told me, “kopimi is the natural state of the universe.”

This belief is expressed by Kopimists via a devotional act called “kopyacting.” As Gerson explained to an interviewer from New Scientist, “We have a part of our religious practices where we worship the value of information by copying it.” According to the Kopimist 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, Missionary Message and Constitution, as much information between each other as possible.”

Another, related precept that characterizes Kopimist thought is the notion that, due to its fundamental 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, which states that “All people should have access to all information produced.” This fundamental human right is also viewed from the reverse direction, as a right inhering to information itself:

Information—a dual [sic] of matter—is intangible, inexhaustible, and illuminating. As matter wants to fall, information wants to be free. Kopimism takes advantage of these sacred (God given) properties of reality for the benefit of humanity.

This precept quotes and builds upon—or as Kopimists would say, “copymixes”^[6]—the notion that “information wants to be free,” a phrase typically attributed to internet community pioneer Stewart Brand and popular among internet-freedom advocates. Yet while most people who use the phrase probably think of it as a metaphorical scientific conceit, Kopimism appears to treat the term anthropomorphically, ascribing a degree of agency and consciousness to information itself.

The flip side of this precept is the notion that restricting the flow of information is equivalent to a crime against humanity. The Kopimist Constitution argues that “To keep source code hidden from others is comparable to slavery,” and that intellectual-property laws are “egregious violations of our intellectual sovereignty and freedom.” Instead of political and economic arguments based on reasoned analysis, these are moral declarations rooted in passionate faith.

A third precept is the notion that altering, combining or adding to information is more godly, and therefore more virtuous, than merely reproducing it in its “original” form. As the Kopimist Constitution argues, “Copymixing is a sacred kind of copying, moreso than the perfect, digital copying, because it expands and enhances the existing wealth of information.” This logic would seem to fly in the face of critics who view Kopimist dogma as merely a legitimizing screen for peer-to-peer file sharing. To the devout, remixing a Harry Potter movie is far superior to merely sharing the unaltered video file.

Engström explicitly connects this philosophical premise to the genesis of life itself:

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

Despite Kopimism’s belief in the “intrinsic value of information” and the sanctity of copying, there are some instances in which Kopimists believe information should remain unshared. The most important example is personal privacy, conceived as a fundamental right. The Kopimism website states unequivocally that “It is a direct sin to monitor and eavesdrop on people.” The Kopimist Constitution extends this protective halo to all of its liturgical spaces and practices, and admonishes followers to obscure their communications via encryption.

Kopimists’ emphasis on the “freedom” of information may seem to conflict directly with their belief in privacy and secrecy. Yet adherents seem comfortable navigating these apparently irreconcilable values. A Kopimist from the Czech Republic named Nick Wao explained, “I think personal information are NOT part of koppimism … to be right, if are some data private, they shouldn’t be copied, I also respect privacy of data [sic].” Another participant agreed that the two precepts “do seem to be contradictory,” yet concluded that “all information” means public information about the world, not private information about a person.

Kopimist theologians and practitioners are actively engaged in a continuing dialogue regarding the moral delineations of information sharing. I asked participants whether certain kinds of information sharing were sinful or holy—namely, wholesale surveillance by intelligence agencies, “revenge porn,” and nuclear launch codes. They offered thoughtful, nuanced responses. One participant said the difference between good and bad sharing ultimately reduces to a question of the sharer’s motivations, and that public information sharing generally benefits society while sharing private information against an individual’s will harms it.

What is perhaps most striking is the degree of responsibility conferred on individuals to make moral and ethical judgements in the absence of clear guidelines. These opinions demonstrate that Kopimism is, for many devotees, the furthest thing from either absurdist spectacle or criminal hoax. It is a value system that allows people living in information-rich environments to make complex ethical decisions with a moral focus not addressed by traditional religions and not prioritized by today’s conflicting and politicized legal codes. According to Christopher Carmean, founder of the First United Church of Kopimism in the United States, “Kopimism does not dictate where these lines should be drawn. We hope to empower people to become their own masters and to decide what is right and wrong for themselves.”

This fact brings context to the final precept to emerge from Kopimist dogma: the laws of the state are inferior to, and often irrelevant to, the moral judgements of the religion and its adherents. The Kopimism website proclaims simply that “Information technology is not to be fettered by laws.” The Kopimist credo encourages followers not to copyright their work or patent their inventions, and demands the right to copy, modify, publish and implement information presented to them.

Finally, Kopimists appear to take nearly as dim a view of religious dogma as they do of other forms of codified ideology. With their emphasis on self-directed moral judgement and their fundamental mistrust of fixed, written codes, adherents tend to question even the letters of their own laws. Far from feeling threatened by this resistance, Gerson told me that scepticism of moral authority is one of his own core values: “I feel a general distrust against religious organizations where you have a cultural elite that decides what the others should think … the philosophers of a religious group should be everyone.”

With its declaration that “the internet is holy,” its celebration of technologies like peer-to-peer file sharing and data encryption, and its active rejection of copyright law, Kopimism is very much a religion rooted in contemporary networked global culture. Yet “POwr, Broccoli and KOPIMI” situates the religion within the longer continuum of human culture, claiming that the religion is “seeded in prehistory [and] rooted in the future.”

Many scholars and cultural commentators have wondered why Sweden specifically has become a locus for “pirate” culture in the twenty-first century, producing Piratbyrån and its three offspring: The Pirate Bay, the Pirate Party and Kopimism. Patrick Burkart points to Sweden’s unique combination of high communications-technology penetration and computer literacy, a thriving hacker subculture, political and social tolerance for marginal groups, a liberal jurisdictional system and a commons-oriented approach to the physical environment.

This last point seems especially compelling. The Swedish practice of allemansrätten, or right of public access known as “every man’s right” to roam and camp in the countryside, combined with our contemporary view of cyberspace as a virtual topography, logically lends itself to a model of the networked information sphere as a space for all comers, a terrain in which it is every user’s right to copy, paste and remix the cultural archive. Gerson, an avid hiker, confirmed this connection explicitly: “the allemansrätten is creating a commons, which is also what we want to do through copying. We want information and knowledge and culture to be a commons.”^[8]

Yet I believe there is another factor at play as well—a religious precept that predated and possibly informed these other factors. In the Poetic Edda, a collection of ancient poems that forms the basis of Scandinavian mythology and the contemporary cultures built upon it, Odin discovers written language while hanging from the World Tree, a bloody sacrifice by himself and to himself. In verse, Odin describes the wonderment he felt on making this discovery:

Well-being I won

And wisdom too.

I grew and took joy in my growth:

From a word to a word

I was led to a word,

From a deed to another deed.

Thus, for Scandinavian cultures, the very definition of wisdom and well-being originates in the ability to encode and decode information, in the ability to traverse the informatic landscape “from a word to a word.”

Of course, pagan religions were not the only ones to play a role in shaping Scandinavian culture. Even at the time the Poetic Edda was written, around the turn of the thirteenth century, Sweden was in the process of becoming officially Christianized—a designation that remained more or less intact until the Church of Sweden ceased to be the nation’s state religion in 2000.

First, the sacred valence of copying and sharing in Kopimism bears more than a passing resemblance to the knowledge regimes that characterized monastic Christian principles and practices. St. Irenaeus, a second-century theologian, would append to his texts a formula dictating 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 glorious Second Coming, in which He will come to judge the living and dead, compare what you have copied against the original and correct it carefully. Furthermore, transcribe this adjuration and place it in the copy.

This protocol was in turn copied by St. Jerome 200 years later and continued to be used by monks well into the Middle Ages whenever they transcribed holy scriptures. In the centuries that followed, copying texts was considered a devotional practice for many monastic traditions and was not limited to Judeo-Christian sources. Reformers and innovators such as St. Pachomius, Cassiodorus and St. Boethius all emphasized the sacred duty of copying, and the latter two played important roles in ensuring that Hellenic and Roman texts, as well as contemporary works of secular philosophy, were preserved by Christian scribes.

I am not suggesting that the spirit of copying is identical in monastic Christianity and Kopimism; where the former was principally concerned with maintaining copy fidelity, better to transmit the “word of God” or the wisdom of the ancients, the latter is more concerned with copying for its own sake and privileges interpretation over fidelity. Yet these distinctions are not so great as they may seem. Monastic Christianity, copyright and Kopimism can each be understood as value systems that govern socioepistemological processes—the social establishment of “truth”—during the eras of informatic scarcity, mechanical reproduction and digital dematerialization, respectively. Seen through this lens, Kopimism is a serious attempt to reconcile the regulatory demands of the twentieth-century copyright regime with the cultural ramifications of today’s global digital information infrastructure. Put another way, while copyright laws sacrifice technological innovation to preserve industrial capitalism, Kopimist doctrine sacrifices industrial capitalism to preserve technological innovation.

Another Christian tradition that may be understood as an antecedent to Kopimism is “logos theology,” rooted in the belief that God created the world through the act of speaking it into existence. The apotheosis of this belief is in John 1:1, typically translated into English as “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” Yet the Greek term logos has a number of possible interpretations other than “Word,” and a long history of philosophical debate accompanies its interpretation.

Some scholars see the origin of the concept as Platonic, relating to the notion of logos—more often interpreted in English as “logic”—as the instrument by which humans may glimpse the contours of the world of perfect forms that hovers just beyond the limits of our senses and sensibilities. Other scholars emphasize the linguistic dimensions of logos in Christian scripture, interpreting our powers to communicate as derivatives of God’s voice in the act of creation. These scholars, including Karl Barth and other avatars of modern European Protestantism, view it as our shared duty as humans to use our voices to proclaim the Word of God—in essence, to continue the breath of creation throughout the entirety of our lives.

To me, the Barthian perspective seems especially relevant to Kopimism. In both cases, information and communication are seen as the constituent processes underpinning creation. In both cases, spreading information is seen as a sacred duty—continuing God’s work on Earth, to put it in doctrinal terms. And, at a deeper level, Barthian thought and Gersonian thought both exhibit a healthy mistrust of modern liberalism, or the elevation of the individual to the primary unit of social action and analysis. To be sure, Kopimism invests its followers with significant moral agency and gives individual decisions primacy over both legal and scriptural dictates. But the aim is to escape liberalism, not to reinforce it.

Gerson views Holy Communion as his “theological starting point” and considers it the first step in building a radical Christian identity against individualism. This brings Gerson’s consecration of peer-to-peer file sharing into sharp focus. His understanding 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 of loving thy neighbor. That we all share the same bread means that we are all part of the same world, the same system.” In conversation, he expanded on this theme:

Through sharing, we become one mind with several parts. We are individuals, in a kind of collective being. Our minds become connected in this big distribution network: You can’t really say where one mind stops and another mind begins. And it’s not just relations between people, it’s between people and machines, too.

Kopimism, a religion that began as a “joke” according to its own founders, is widely interpreted as at best an act of political theater and at worst a criminal insult to genuine faith. Yet in the few short years since its creation, its theologians and growing ranks of followers around the world have begun to develop a set of moral and ethical precepts and practices that help them navigate complex questions of personal agency, power and identity in globalized, postindustrial, networked 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. As Engström told me, part of the appeal is simply that Kopimism does not require its adherents to ignore or overlook scientific explanations of reality: “I also feel so unsatisfied by all the old religions … the old religions are not really up to scratch. They’re completely incompatible with science if you read them literally.” Engström is not alone in this regard; Sweden is by some measures the most atheist or agnostic nation in the world, with as many as 85 percent of the population falling into the “nonbeliever” category. When a New York Times reporter asked Gerson whether he believes in God, he answered, “No, I just believe in our values. It’s just a belief in holy values.”^[10]

Yet there is little question that these “holy values” amount to more than mere political conviction or adolescent antiauthoritarianism. When Kopimist dogma calls on followers to “continuously mock and ridicule all aspects of copyright,” the commandment gives voice to moral outrage and spurs collective action against the ravages of industrial capitalism and Western cultural hegemony. Though he may not believe in “God” as a reified concept or institutionally sanctioned deity, Gerson is avowedly a Christian, seeking a means to transcend the pettiness and corruption of human affairs through communion with his fellow humans and with the cosmos at large.

Though this philosophy has the distinct ring of libertarian Marxism, it echoes many of the same themes without retaining either its fundamental antipathy towards religion or its foundations in a class-based, materialist conception of social dynamics. Ultimately, it is not just the class system or industrial capitalism that Kopimism seeks to overthrow, but the entire freight of Western liberal thought. When “POwr, Broccoli and KOPIMI” announces that “the book you’re about to read has no author, no designer, no typesetter, no distribution channel,” it is intentionally jettisoning the individual baby with the industrial bathwater. “No Kopimist is wholly self sufficient,” the Kopimist Constitution argues, echoing Donne, “each being just one component of an interconnected and interdependent world.”

Donne penned his “Meditation XVII” in 1623, just as colonization and industrialization were combining to enmesh the globe in a new world order, and as thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes and Francis Bacon were building the philosophical foundations of modern liberalism and empiricism. Donne’s work can be viewed as a form of poetic inoculation, a reminder that the new language of individual rights and responsibilities, like the invisible suffering of factory workers and plantation slaves, obscured a deeper truth: that we are all connected, all part 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 same message. In its vision of communal property and unconditional “datalove,” it harkens back nostalgically to a time before the mania of the marketplace reconfigured our inner and outer lives in its own image. Yet in its embrace of digital technology and its vision of the globe as a network of “noble peers,” it also looks forward, with clearer eyes than most. One only needs to skim the trajectory of technological development to realize that the pace of change will soon contribute to drastic alterations in our social order, our cultural mores, our bodies and our consciousness itself.^[11]

As the networks around us and within us grow more complex, more robust and capable of processing geometrically greater volumes of information and power with every passing year, the threat of subjugation and the opportunity for liberation will grow as well. Some will find hope for liberation in reforming laws and renewing the social contract, while others will seek independence through technological prowess. Kopimists have charted another path, as Donne did: “by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security.”

Copy and seed.

[1] Quotation is from Gerson (2014). This and all Swedish articles were first translated by Google Translate and then corrected by Linn Ahlbom.

[2] The wedding video is available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYAiZ-L4gXg.

[3] At the time of writing, there are continuing legal and police actions against The Pirate Bay, including a recent raid and seizure of the site’s internet servers.

[4] All direct quotes from Engström, unless otherwise cited, are from a personal communication via telephone, November 22, 2013.

[5] All direct quotes from Gerson, unless otherwise cited, are from a personal communication via telephone, May 16, 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 the context of specific quotations.

[7] “Datalove” is a concept embraced by Kopimists and #telecomix members that refers to the development of intimacy and empathy through the act of sharing information.

[8] The legal “freedom to roam” is not unique to Sweden; similar codes can be found throughout Northern Europe and other parts of the world. Nor is it in any way ancient; rather, as Wiktorsson (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 the expertise and generosity of the scholars Harry Bruinius and Max Lindenman for feedback 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 some of the basic claims of this article regarding the doctrinal roots of Kopimism. Yet, as a range of scholars have argued, a religiously unaffiliated 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 discuss these potentialities through the lens of “posthumanism.” While I acknowledge the value of this nomenclature, I also feel it should not be deployed without a degree of scrutiny and critique that exceeds the scope of this article; hence, my choice is to avoid the terminology altogether.

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