FCCC-P?

File sharing is now ordained in Sweden.

Since 2010, Church of Kopimism, a group of self-confessed pirates, had been denied several times in their attempt to have their beliefs recognized as an official religion. The "Kopimists", who hold CTRL+C and CTRL+V as sacred symbols, finally got their approval, and hope their official status will remove the legal stigma that surrounds file-sharing.

Here's the loose timeline on the origin of the religion: In 2001, a lobby group called the Antipiratbyrån (the Anti-Piracy Bureau) was formed in Sweden to combat copyright infringement. By 2003, the free-information movement mockingly copied the lobby group’s name and removed the "anti", calling themselves Piratbyrån (the Piracy Bureau). Piratbyrån created The Pirate Bay site, which quickly became the world’s most notorious source for downloading feature films, TV shows, and software. Ibrahim Botani, a central figure in Piratbyrån, designed a kind of un-copyright logo called “kopimi” (pronounced “copy me”) in 2005. Adding the kopimi mark, as it were, to a work of intellectual property indicated that you not only give permission for it to be copied but actively encourage it.

When Botani died unexpectedly, in 2010, Piratbyrån decided to disband. The Pirate Bay is still thriving despite the ongoing criminal case against its operators, and there's even the Pirate Party, a political party with a pro-Internet platform with special emphasis on copyright and patent reform. Isak Gerson, a philosophy student and active Pirate Party member, was such a religious (pun intended) file-sharer, he founded The Missionary Church of Kopimism to protect his "sacred beliefs". And in the last six months their ranks have tripled to 3,000 devotees.

Ultimately, it may not separate church and state, but I'm all for a more tolerant P2P world of belief.