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Swedish File-Sharers File For Religious Status

nloop writes "A group of file-sharers in Sweden have requested that their religion, Kopimism, be officially recognized in Sweden. Although this status has been denied once in the past the struggle for religious freedom from persecution continues. Aside from deeming CTRL+C CTRL+V as sacred symbols other beliefs include the flow of information being ethically right and closed source software being 'akin to slavery.'"

10 of 420 comments (clear)

  1. Heretics! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    All who follow the mighty Jobs know that the only proper religious symbols are cmd-c, cmd-v

    1. Re:Heretics! by VortexCortex · · Score: 5, Insightful

      All who follow the mighty Jobs know that the only proper religious symbols are cmd-c, cmd-v

      All who are true practitioners remember the arcane incantations ctrl+ins and ctrl+shift+ins...

      Beware younglings, for ctrl+c or cmd+c may invoke the dark ones, who will promptly unleash their wrath and cancel your program depending on the gracious terminal that surrounds and gives meaning to your actions... At all times we must be mindful of the terminal, for it is the source of all, it permeates and binds our actions into reality.

      When in full presence of the holy terminal you must tread lightly and always remember to show your respect by donning the venerable shift key's cloak of distinction when you utter either form of the standard incantations, lest you interrupt the dark one's slumber.

      Only a false prophet claims there is but one true way. Only a fool believes such lies -- There are many paths to a single place depending on your origin.

      Also note that the good enjoy a hearty embrace -- Be wary of those that when greeted with a friendly grasp of hand, later claim you have held them wrongly.

  2. Why be such morons? by Antidamage · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is not the way to get the ethos behind file-sharing taken seriously. It's counter-productive and childish.

    1. Re:Why be such morons? by MoonBuggy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Just to clarify, in case anyone gets the wrong end of the stick: I'm of the firm opinion that everyone should be able to say and believe absolutely what the hell they like, and those rights should be protected indiscriminately for all, but the problems start occurring when you offer religious organisations tax breaks, exemptions from laws applied to other organisations, and so forth.

    2. Re:Why be such morons? by DigiShaman · · Score: 5, Informative

      Why do you think Scientology was created? It was to provide tax-exempt status to a legalized pyramid scheme. The closer you get to reaching Clear, the more about this scheme is revealed to you. Of course, not until after you dump tons of money into it. So by the time you've reached Clear, you've now accepted that Scientology is complete and total bullshit yet but must keep your underlings in the dark just long enough to cash-out.

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
  3. Story of Beginning in this religion by CrystalFalcon · · Score: 5, Informative

    Don't miss out on Member of European Parliament Christian Engström's suggestion for a religious version of the Beginning for this religion.

    Short version:

    1. There was chaos and soup.
    2. Somebody in the soup learned to copy. Thus was Life.
    3. Having learned to copy, they built magnificent things.
    4. We honor the beginning by copying and building magnificent things.

    Not bad, I think.

    1. Re:Story of Beginning in this religion by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      100% of people who build things, copy things.

  4. Re:Them swedes. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You refer to this question:

    Wait, how is desiring to collect more entertainment than could ever be consumed in a human lifetime without compensating the creators not a form of personal greed?

    I guarantee it has been answered in the past ten years. You have just not been paying attention. But I will answer it again.

    Having free access to more oxygen than can be consumed in a human lifetime is not considered personal greed. Why not? Because the good is abundant. Same for data. Once it exists, it is even more abundant than oxygen. It can be duplicated endlessly without costing anyone anything. Therefore, performing such replication is not greedy.

    If my copy of it prevented you from having a copy of it, then grabbing up more than I need would be greed. Since that isn't the case, the word greed does not apply.

    There you go, answered. You might disagree (and you would be wrong) but you can no longer claim that it hasn't been answered.

  5. Re:Them swedes. by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Having free access to more oxygen than can be consumed in a human lifetime is not considered personal greed. Why not? Because the good is abundant. Same for data. Once it exists, it is even more abundant than oxygen. It can be duplicated endlessly without costing anyone anything. Therefore, performing such replication is not greedy.

    Movies aren't like oxygen. If people don't pay to watch them the businesses that make movies will do something else instead. Talking about the costs of making a copy (zero) and neglecting the cost of making the original movie (hundreds of millions of dollars) completely misses the point that the reason people are willing to invest money in making movies is because they expect to get that money back and more from selling the right to see it. If everyone pirated it rather than paying to see it there would be no reason to invest money in making future movies. Thus movies would not get made.

    So the people that pirate are reducing the chance of future movies from being made by reducing the profits on the ones that exist. They are a bit like customers that go to a restaurant and eat their fill but don't pay - in the long run they will force the restaurant out of business. That could easily be described as greedy by other non free loading patrons. Not to mention by the owner.

    --
    echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
  6. Re:Them swedes. by silanea · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You folks always talk about the cost of producing movies/books/music, as if it were of any relevance to the debate. The cost of producing anything is an economic risk that lies squarely with the producer. Whether you are recording an album or manufacturing a car is irrelevant. What we should be talking about is the value of things. People pay significant premiums to have an Adidas logo on their running pants or a BMW sign on their car. The retail prices of both the pants and the car have very little to do with the cost of producing either but everything to do with how much people are willing to pay for having them, ie.: their value.

    Apparently the perception of media's value has changed over the last decades. Where the producers - or more to the point: the distributors - see the value stable or even going up, the consumers see it going down. Way down. Films, music, books have become a commodity. IMDb gives 4,579 films released in 1970 and 20,578 in 2010. Those numbers may not be completely representative but they do get the point across: There is so much media competing with each other that the value of individual works has decreased. Add to that the vastly reduced cost of reproduction and you end up with a product which is seen as almost worthless by its supposed consumers.

    --
    Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.