The Piracy Crusade: How the Music Industry's War on Sharing Destroys Markets and Erodes Civil Liberties

9. Is Democracy Piracy?

179 C H A P T E R 9 Is Democracy Piracy? I A 2012, a young couple got married in Belgrade, Serbia. The wedding video1 shows the bride and groom smiling nervously as they stand on a dais in fancy clothes, while the crowd around them titters and cheers and the romantic strains of an aria waft through the air. After the groom lifts the bride’s veil, they exchange heartfelt vows and then kiss. The room erupts with applause. Despite these traditional elements, this was no ordinary wedding. For one thing, the young couple were dressed in a postmodern mélange of styles: the groom offset his brocaded coat, leggings, and neck ruff by dying his short hair maraschino cherry red, while the bride wore a floorlength dress that was white on the left and black on the right with black breast cones and a single elbow-length black silk glove on her right arm. Far more striking was the officiant to their right: in addition to his conservative black cassock, augmented by a gray and gold stole, he wore a Guy Fawkes mask and sported a laptop emblazoned with stickers (fig. 11). The laptop was evidently the source of the officiant’s “voice,” which in its computer-generated cadences asked each party to take the other as a “noble peer” and to “share your love, your knowledge, and your feelings . . . as long as the information exists.” These vows had never been spoken before, because this was the first marriage ever conducted in the Church of Kopimism, a new religion founded in 2010 by a nineteen-year-old philosophy student named Isak Gerson. The religion is based on the principles that copying, disseminating , and reconfiguring information not only are ethically right but are in themselves “sacred” acts of devotion. Kopimist philosophy also holds that “the internet is holy” and that “code is law”2 (a phrase copied from the legal scholar Lawrence Lessig).3 When Kopimists first filed to be recognized as an official religion in Gerson’s native country of Sweden, some grumbled that they were 180 CHAPTER 9 simply a bunch of pirates cleverly using religious protection to shield them from liability for P2P. Yet Sweden officially recognized Kopimism in January 2012, and today the religion boasts thousands of members around the world, with chapters in over twenty countries. Of course, file sharing is an important part of the Kopimist belief system and the church openly maintains that “Copyright Religion is our absolute opposite ,” so there can be little question that its resistance to “persecution” at the hands of the piracy crusade “oppressors”4 is both a dogmatic and a practical concern. Although treating the act of copying information as a matter of religious doctrine might at first seem to be exactly the kind of pretentious nonsense most people would expect from a nineteen-year-old Swedish philosophy major, students of religious history will recognize in Kopimism echoes of many other doctrines, such as early Christianity. For instance, St. Irenaeus, a second-century theologian, would append to his texts a formula dictating the terms on which they should be copied: “You who will transcribe this book, I charge you, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and of His glorious Second Coming, in which He will come to judge the living and dead, compare what you have copied against the original and correct it carefully. Furthermore, transcribe this adjuration and place it in the copy.”5 This protocol was in turn copied by St. Jerome two hundred years later in his work De viris illustribus, and, based on that work, the formula Figure 11. The world’s first Kopimist wedding, in Belgrade, Serbia, April 2012. IS DEMOCRACY PIRACY? 181 continued to be used by monks well into the Middle Ages, whenever they transcribed holy scriptures.6 In fact, it was only with the introduction of movable type and the publication of the Gutenberg Bible that the act of copying began to lose its sacred valence in the Christian world. As I discussed in chapter 1, this innovation was also a precursor to, and a precondition of, the development of copyright. Thus, we can understand Kopimism not as the spiritualization of something that began as a commercial and industrial process, but rather the re-spiritualization of a process following a long intermediary period of industrial capitalism. I am not...