Copying as religion – P2P as in Priest2Priest // #lulz #copyright #religion

Posted on | January 8, 2012 | No Comments

Brokep aka. Peter Sunde of Flattr (ao.) writes on his blog (with reference to the recent news that “Kopimistsamfundet” – “The Society of Kopimism” – was officially accepted as a new religion in Sweden) that he’s “been following the church up closely and wanted to post my views on why this is an important move.” This turns out to be quite funny and enlightening.

He goes on to specify that it made him “think that it might be beneficial to look at what we (as, in this editor’s rendition, a broad term for technology libertarians, hackers, nerds, open culture activists etc.) do as a religious movement. One of the fun things working with The Pirate Bay has always been that we’ve started lots of fun crazy projects. Some work, some (most) fail. I started researching what kind of angle it would give us if we registered a religion.”

The key thing here is that as a religious group in Sweden, it turned out, you actually have more privacy (legally) than other assemblies and organisation. In other words, religious groups are more protected constitutionally than other types of groups. The idea behind this is that the laws allowing for, for instance, surveillance of groups and individuals may not legal if they’re members of an officially religious group.

Now comes the funny and compelling crux of the post: “In some religions (I don’t know about Kopimistsamfundet yet, maybe they can answer) there’s a Seal of Confession – which means that when you talk to a priest in the congregation, the priest have to keep what you say confidential. This is respected in some countries as law, where the courts can not make the priest testify against the individual. And some religions – at least the Mormons as far as I know – consider all members of the church to be a priest. This is probably the thing that I love the most with kopimism as a religion – we can have yet another form of P2P communication – Priest2priest. With no legal right for anyone to listen in to the conversation perhaps. This must be researched.”

Indeed it must. Read the full blog post here.

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