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.'"

Re:Them swedes.

[unity100]

do you see the irony of requiring compensation on something that will not be ever used on a lifetime, and the same thing also being reproduceable/copiable faster than the original author can say 'copyright' ?

Hypocrites

[tsa]

I agree with you wholeheartedly. I also suspect that members of this sect will cry foul when for instance some of their GPL'd code is found to be plagierized and used in another program.

Re:What do they share?

[Hal_Porter]

Curiously most of the stuff they share is produced in the US.

Re:Why be such morons?

[Toze]

As a Master's theology student and active church member, I agree. I'm increasingly uncomfortable with church tax breaks. Sure, it's nice, and maybe if there's rules for secular non-profits I wouldn't mind incorporating in that sense, but for governments to specifically say "you're a religious organization, you get tax breaks" is to say as well that "you're _not_ a religious organization, you get no tax breaks." You can't read a lot of religious history without getting nervous about governments deciding what is and isn't a religion.

As an unrelated aside, the same kind of argument is why I dislike legal protection of "traditional" marriage.

Re:Them swedes.

[RobbieThe1st]

How about said authors do the right thing: Just /stop/. If you're not making money off of it, and you need said money, stop making things! Maby we'll end up with /less/ crappy movies and formula fiction. The only thing that would be left is A, things that were done for free /just because/, and B, stuff that relies on other buisness models(Like advertising - you don't pay to watch it). You might even see crowdsourced stuff: Pay upfront and everyone gets it.
Sure, you wouldn't have many 100m+ budget movies... but do you need it? People will figure out ways to do things cheaper, and you'd have a /lot/ less corporate parasitism.

I suspect we'd see a lot less crap, an overall reduction in total volume, and a better signal-to-noise ratio. And that's a good thing.

Re:Them swedes.

[silanea]

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.

Re:Them swedes.

[Internetuser1248]

The above is actually a much more important point than it seems. According to this guy [ted.com] (about 9 mibutes in) the Copenhagen summit consensus panel estimated that loosening of trade barriers and subsidies in the US and EU would result in pulling hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in only 2-3 years and result in massive gains for the world economy. This would result also in wages going up in third world countries, making outsourcing less profitable and in turn putting money in the pockets of workers in the first world countries. The reason this isn't done is because it is more profitable for the corporations operating in those countries to have this poverty. To bring this train of thought back on topic, economically, sharing and globalism have an end result of making everyone better off. The question with copyright law as with free/fair trade is corporate profits vs social gains. Now choose.