Cool for copycats

The recognition of a new faith group caused a bit of incredulous hilarity earlier in the month:

A "church" whose central tenet is the right to file-share has been formally recognised by the Swedish government.

The Church of Kopimism claims that "kopyacting" - sharing information through copying - is akin to a religious service.

BBC

But, as Melvyn Bragg discovered in a recent edition of The Written Word, it's not an entirly novel idea. The relevant Wikipedia entry summarises a long-standing religious precedent:

In Buddhism, great merit is thought to accrue from copying and preserving texts , the fourth-century master listing the copying of scripture as the first of ten essential religious practices. The importance of perpetuating texts is set out with special force in the larger Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtra which not only urges the devout to hear, learn, remember and study the text but to obtain a good copy and to preserve it. This ‘cult of the book’ led to techniques for reproducing texts in great numbers, especially the short prayers or charms known as dhāraṇī-s. Stamps were carved for printing these prayers on clay tablets from at least the seventh century, the date of the oldest surviving examples.

I'm cool with that. The ideaof Kopimists accumulating good karma through the act of digitally sharing the works of the Lady GaGa* seems no more wrong-headed or ridiculous than many long-established religious beliefs (like the doctrine of original sin).

If you're a copyright holder whose work is being ripped off, you may be a bit less relaxed with the idea. I can sympathise with that viewpoint, too. Maybe somebody should point out to the Kopimists that claiming exemption from the norms of reasonable behaviour and from criticism on the grounds that your actions are religiously motivated is a bit arrogant and rather unfair on everybody else. But not before they've pointed the same thing out to the spokespeople for Christianity, Islam and all the other major organised religions, who've been getting away with this sort of thing for centuries.

Issuing a stream of petulant demands may be counter-productive for political parties, but it doesn't seem to have done organised religion much harm - yet.


* Who's not averse to a spot of copying herself - at least according to some people.