Russian adepts of free web data flow plan to register their own religious organization to battle copyright laws. Adherents of the Kopimi, or Copy Me, movement believe the process of exchanging data is sacred and intend to bring the argument to court.
Activists in five Russian cities: Moscow, Saint-Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan and Khabarovsk will officially apply documents to register a church of their own Monday – so that they could launch an assault on copyright laws that “insult religious feelings of the believers”, the chairman of the Russian Pirate Party Pavel Rassudov told Izvestia.
“The church registration process will take years but adepts of
kopimism will have the right to sue the anti-pirate laws,”
Rassudov insisted.
The Kopimi community was established by the founders of the
Pirate Bay file sharing service and has been officially
registered as religion in Sweden.
Kopimism is based on the belief that any information is
inherently valuable. According to the dogmas of the new religion,
the Internet is sacred while copying and distribution of
information is morally justified.
Kopimi activists are battling the copyright owners who in their
belief prevent free information distribution.
According to the law “On freedom of conscience and on religious
associations” Russian citizens have a right to organize into a
religious groups without obligatory official registration. No
less than ten people could make up a group that after 15 years of
proven existence could be registered as a legal entity. Three
such groups can form a centralized religious organization.
The new church intends to stream into being on the wave of 2
recent laws that stirred media frenzy in Russia. The first one is
the freshly signed piece of legislation on insulting believers’ feelings that
materialized after the furor Pussy Riot’s caused in Moscow Christ
the Savior Cathedral.
The other one is the new anti-piracy law, which came into force
on Thursday, allowing pre-trial blocking of web-pages to protect
movies and TV series from unlicensed downloading. Some 1,700 Russian websites blacked out to protest
upcoming unwarranted shutting down on August 1.
At the same time the current legal prospects for the Kopimi
church in Russia are vague, believe experts.
Russia is a secular state where any church is separated from
power, so religious organizations do not have serious influence
on national the legislature, legal expert Viktor Naumov told
Izvestia newspaper.
A direct appeal to the Constitutional Court is probably the only
chance for the Kopimi activists because only this organization
could decide that the rights of a new religious group are being
violated, Naumov said.
Moreover, Russia’s Pirate Party itself has been consistently
denied registration as the Central Election Commission says it’s
promoting piracy – which in the authorities’ understanding is an
assault on sea vessels and is punishable under the Criminal
Code.