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Idle: File-Sharing Is Not a Religion, Says Swedish Government
Dangerous_Minds writes "ZeroPaid is reporting on an attempt in Sweden to recognize filesharing as a religion. The religion's website calls this 'Kopimism' and says that sharing of knowledge is sacred. Apparently, Swedish authorities were not convinced. A recent report shows that the attempt failed to convince the authorities to recognize Kopimism as a religion."
this is clearly an agenda and bias. everyone should have the right to be insane (er, I mean, have a religion). age of the fantasy should not be relevant at all.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
That's just anarchy. And despite what some loons may claim, it doesn't work.
As you know very well, copyright law has nothing to do with peoples' personal information.
They are doing it wrong: you need to lock up the information, so you can get religious status (Scientology).
I wonder what court ever decided it was OK for LR Hubbard's crap to get religious status?
Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/
Funny, that can be said about most religions too. Followers do something stupid (Crusades, terrorism, crazy priests, etc.) and the rest of the world decides that anything connected to them must be stamped out immediately for the greater good.
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
I wonder how many Jedi and Scientologists just started cancelling their summer vacation plans to visit Sweden....
"This religion doesn't rely on needless superstition and blind faith."
"Doesn't fit the criteria, then."
I don't know, ask the Catholic Church that question. It's clearly an international child molestation racket which largely functions to protect its leadership from prosecution, yet to date no legal authority has moved to shut it down.
works for RIAA and MPAA, got them to change laws in their favor :)
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
Whoever made the ruling never read slashdot.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
This happens all the time laws will have exceptions (like slaugher cannot cause unnecessary suffering, except...) and also other rules. Sometimes a classroom can be half-filled with students with something on their head, but little Johnny is warned to take off his baseball cap. The trick to this is that "freedom of religion" trumps most other laws. Kopimism sounds like very interesting as a religion... once there are enough followers, the government has no choice but to recognize it.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
I am curious as to what their criteria are. If Scientology can be a religion, why cant anything?
Privacy laws designed to control identity fraud are far more aligned with trade secret than with copyright.
MONEY is the winning argument every time. If you lose, you didn't spend enough MONEY.
Scientology has money and possibly many believers are lawyers... but more likely the lawyers simply believe in MONEY (as most lawyers do.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
We must summon the AOL Running man!!!
That's because they have God on their side.
Liberty.
Tangents aren't tangible. In fact, all math isn't tangible. There is no such thing as a "two". There is two of something. But there is no "two." Hint: numbers are natures adjectives which we describe as nouns in order to facilitate our communication through abstractions. But our mode of communication doesn't cause these abstractions to exist. This was a tangential point however. </self_amusement>
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
once there are enough followers, the government has no choice but to recognize it.
you're new here, aren't you? (checks uid). yup. figured.
the government (any of them, ANY of them) has no obligation to follow the will of the people.
can you honestly say that any gov has been an obedient servant to the public? I can't think of any country that truly fits that bill.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Of course, they can work. They just need a different species to try them.
Rethinking email
They are into adoration of Money.
Intelectual Property is just a means.
Rethinking email
There's nothing about the _religion_ here. Nobody's being denied the right to believe whatever the fuck they want to believe.
What happened here was that an ad-hoc religious _organization_ was denied the right to be considered a religious organization in the legal sense. Contrary to what people here are blindly asserting, that does not give them any tax benefits in addition to the ones you already have as a non-profit (which is a prerequisite for becoming a recognized religious organization). It just changes some purely legal/organizational aspects and liabilities.
And the requirements to qualify here is, in the simplest possible terms, that it's a serious organization. That it has a substantial membership, a clear charter, an elected board, organized finances and has exhibited a certain 'permanence'. The "age of the fantasy" is **not** relevant, even though you claim it is. But the age of the organization **is** relevant.
It's got nothing to do with what they believe or whether or not they actually believe it, and everything to do with whether or not they're a serious organization. The law was written more or less specifically with the intent of stopping people from registering merely as a joke. And the letter of the law is being followed here.
Wait...I thought that was al-Qaeda?
Piratism has a decent chance of becoming a religion. It just takes a couple of centuries for a religion to "gel", to be recognized as meeting the key criterion, recognized by the Romans etc.: "It's not going away". In the meantime, they will need to practice what they preach, and take their trials and tribulations.
Gently reply
Government people would probably be willing to agree that Kopism is a cult, though not a "religion".
To become a "religion", a cult has to have existed since before the person thinking it's a religion was born, and have members who that person knows personally, through someone else directly, or has seen on TV without it being called a cult.
It helps if the cult has paid bribes to the person asked to consider it a religion.
Any loosely consistent collection of knowledge that cannot be proven can be a religion. But first it has to pay its dues as a cult for a while.
There is no reason that anyone's unprovable beliefs should ever be the subject of any government action, either positive, negative or otherwise. Membership in a group that believes something unprovable should not entitle anyone to special consideration of any kind. If their actions don't infringe anyone else's rights, they can do whatever they want for whatever reason.
Tax the churches already. The religion exception to everything is the world's second oldest profession, and typically indistinguishable from the oldest - except perhaps as competition.
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make install -not war
No. Seriously! We ARE knowledge sharing beings to the core; This fundamental capability IS the very essence of human nature. Without our ability to communicate and thus share knowledge, information and culture we would be no different than any other primate -- even LESS than apes. Face it: We are not truly human unless we share knowledge. Vast amounts of our existence IS our external culture that we are not born with and that we only acquire through the sharing of information.
We owe our very rule of this planet, our place in the food chain, and EVERY social, technological or other advancement of value to humanity's capability to share our thoughts and culture. Now, for the first time in history, in the Information Age, many humans willingly allow large amounts of our RELEVANT culture to be withheld and actually fight to protect the right of the greedy to DESTROY the public domain -- The very thing that makes us human!
Copyrights are now utterly evil -- They are a plague upon man. These restrictions now last for THREE GENERATIONS: 70 years beyond my life. That's my life, the life of my children (ending 30 years after I die), and the life of my GRANDCHILDREN, 70 years after I die. By the time anyone can LEGALLY duplicate ANY new piece of our culture ( song, books, software, games, photos, paintings ), freely they will be DEAD, and their kids will be DEAD, and their children's children WILL BE DEAD! -- No one who enjoyed the short-lived success of my books and games will even be alive to remember them when they become part of our public domain!
There was another age where the flow of knowledge met such great barriers -- The Dark Ages.
This evil legal idea of Copyright is now designed to ROBS US of our public domain, and ensure that the free common knowledge remains IRRELEVANT! The founding father's of the US granted copyrights for the betterment of society as a whole, and thought that the duplication monopoly should last about 12 to 14 years -- This was in a time when copies were expensive and only a select few could make duplications. These words have been duplicated over TWENTY times before you read them due to the routers between us. We all have duplication machines, we do not need to be protected from those that would hold the printing presses in hostage! The duplications are in INFINITE supply! To merely use information now is to duplicate it many times.
The strict laws designed to keep greedy publishers in line have now been turned against the common man because we all now own information sharing tools capable of creating duplications at essentially zero cost. The copy restrictions harm society as a whole! Down with copyright! Copyright is a law; Jim Crow was a law. Rosa Parks sat at the front of a bus, and none were harmed by her doing so; Ignoring unjust laws is an act of civil protest. I shall share ANY knowledge I desire freely and none shall be harmed by my doing so.
Additionally: Economics 101 -- Regardless of value or demand, if supply is infinite the price is ZERO. Silicon has great value! Would you like to buy some expensive sand?
Outlawing the free sharing of culture is to outlaw human nature -- The very definition of creating a police state.
How dare anyone scoff at the most sane, obvious and basic belief to date: Sharing Knowledge is Sacred.
To each who has, I charge you to isolate yourself and neither give nor take any information form any others! No books, no Internet, no music, NONE of OUR culture -- just solitude! Do not speak to another living human or hear what they say. Try to function this way for JUST ONE WEEK as less than an ape. Otherwise, you must admit your hypocrisy! I would like you to remove yourself from our free sea of culture permanently, but I am not so harsh or foolish to even request someone do such a thing!
Sure
These people approached it the wrong way though, the file-sharing aspect shouldn't have been that obvious to start with. What they should have done is scrape some of Timothy Leary's crankier writing about techno-shamanism where pure a network of pure unified knowledge is the eventual goal of humanity or something and try to get a religion based on that, and only when that is recognized, argue that the set of belief also covers file sharing.
If Kopimism's main doctrine is the sharing of knowledge, then it clearly fails the primary characteristic of a religion, which is to share beliefs. In fact, distinguishing knowledge from belief pretty much disqualifies it as a religion. Religions generally deny the value of knowledge, primarily by classifying knowledge as just another set of beliefs that's no better than anyone else's beliefs.
If you prefer actual knowledge of facts, then you might be a scientist, or a historian, or maybe just an enlightened individual, but you're not religious. Religions don't depend on actual knowledge. You just believe what you're told, because if you don't, then that religion's god(s) will punish you severely (with the help of their followers). This doesn't require any file sharing, since the religious leaders are quite good at supplying you with all the beliefs that you'll ever need.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Jesus copied and shared his loaves and fish.
Maybe they should have tried Kleptomism instead of Kopimism? ;)
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
I saw this great documentary some time ago discussing what distinguishing behavioral characteristics separate us from the apes. When it came right down to it, it was our desire and ability to share information and knowledge that really made the difference. All this copyright stuff literally seeks to limit, control and even deny our very nature. I'm not going to say it's all bad to do that as there are instances where our nature isn't particularly good or flattering. But to deny our nature is another thing.
REM's Losing My Religion?
C'mon guys, Sweden adopted Copyright as its new Religion of State. Can't have a totally competing one, right? The King of Sweden is officially "Copyright Defensor" and reports to Biden, the Supreme Pope of Copyright in the US Whitehouse. Sure, like every religion, there are extremists, but the Copyright Taliban haven't killed anybody... yet... right? Right?
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
As opposed to almost every other "recognized" religion where at their core knowledge is considered a commodity, to be restricted and made available only to the special ones to be sure they can retain their power over their followers.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Like cases of law, previous citation and proof can further validate a point:
:D
- If we could have the Church of Emacs, then why not the religion kopimism?
- If Perl monks can peacefully continue secret enlightenment, then kopimisim perhaps should be given a chance.
The missionary church of kopimis is in contradiction with itself (http://kopimistsamfundet.se/english/).
It's not a contradiction. Just because they hold sharing of information as sacred, and the religion prescribes its followers should share information, does not necessarily mean the religion allows them to eavesdrop to obtain that information.
That's akin to a religion requiring members donate all their money to the church, BUT just because donations are held sacred, and believers are required to donate, does not mean the religion has to allow followers to steal money from one another to give to the church.
And does not necessarily mean the church must not hold sinful acts such as robbery.
Sharing the information may be right and true, but the way information was obtained to share might be considered sinful by their church.