One of the places where music piracy first took hold was Sweden, largely because it was one of the first countries to offer broadband access to large swaths of the population, which, of course, made it super-easy to swap MP3 files. And the Swedes were very serious about file-sharing.
In 2010, a 19-year-old philosophy student named Isak Gerson and Gustav Nipe, an online activist, founded the Missionary Church of Kopimism. It consisted of a congregation of adherents that reached around 4,000 who believed that copying and distributing information of all kinds was a sacred thing, copyright be damned. On January 5, 2012, Kopimism was accepted by the Swedish government as an actual church.
Since then, Kopimism has spread to Canada, the US, Japan, and Israel. Ministers have even performed weddings.
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