Quote Originally Posted by Deborski View Post
Digital religion: Russian Pirate Church eyes registration — RT News

From article:

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.

As far as I understand Russia isn't massively keen on foreign religions, so this might fall on the restrictions around that. Kopimism might get denied the rights to run its religion....

Very sad to hear that this has reached Russia too. However I don't think Russians will be strongly affected by this as people in the English speaking world.
I've got at least 10 sites censored nowadays, and started using private invitation-only torrent sites instead along with VPN based in another country.
And good luck to the copyright holders trying to get people in the Russian far east who are living on <$1000 per month to pay $$$ for software and entertainment. All they will achieve is to make the pirates cleverer, Open source more popular, or lose customers and goodwill, essentially minimizing their own userbase.