Image from gawkerassets.com
The Missionary Church of Kopimism has been officially recognized as a church in Sweden. The approval came shortly before Christmas on the group’s third try for official church status. According to Isak Gerson, the founder of the church, “Information is holy and copying is a sacrament.” The sacred symbols of the church include CTRL+C and CTRL+V and the group holds religious services called kopyactings where members of the religious community share information. Membership exceeds 3000.
Some critics think that the group is trying to get around anti-piracy laws. Some supporters say it is a step towards open sharing of information. Gerkson adds, “Hopefully this is one step towards the day when we can live out our faith without fear of prosecution.”
The website has been up and down recently with all of the media coverage but here is a prayer from their website. See if it sounds familiar:
Our copy, thou who art in computer
blessed be thy bits.
Internet come.
Your code be done,
in torrent, as it is on the disk.
Our daily bandwidth, give us today,
and forgive us for our closed ports,
as we forgive those who stop seeding,
and do not shut us out behind a firewall
but make us a port-forward to the torrent client.
For thine is the copy, our powr and top ten downloads.
In eternity.
So what will be the impact on libraries in Sweden? Will they now be de-facto houses of worship? What about in America? Time will tell if the “religious fervor” reaches our shores and the students at the copier aren’t just preparing for class but are instead engaged in worship.
Image from datachurch.com
~Mary Susan Lucas~
It is wonderful to see increasing numbers of americans are stressed in relation to the PIPA act.