Kopimism's roots are activist before they are religious. Piratbyran, "the Bureau of Piracy," formed in Sweden in 2003 as a satirical counter-organization to the country's newly created Antipiracy Bureau, and in January 2005 it registered the domain kopimi.com: a simple invitation for anyone to mark their own material "kopimi," inviting the world to copy it freely. Piratbyran's members went on to found the file sharing site the Pirate Bay the same year, but the kopimi idea kept its own separate life as a standalone ethic rather than merging fully into that better known project.
In 2010 Isak Gerson, then a nineteen-year-old philosophy student, formalized that ethic as a church. His reasoning was practical as much as devotional: Swedish law offers religious communities specific protections that ordinary activist groups do not receive, and Gerson argued that if file sharing truly functioned as a sincerely held ethical practice for a real community of people, it deserved to be tested against that legal category directly rather than only defended as ordinary political speech.
The test took three attempts. Kammarkollegiet, Sweden's Legal, Financial and Administrative Services Agency, rejected the Missionary Church of Kopimism's registration application twice before formally recognizing it as a religious community on 5 January 2012, the agency evidently satisfied that the church's six axioms, its "operator" clergy and its gathering places functioned as a coherent belief system and not merely as a legal maneuver dressed in religious language.