Sweden has recognized file sharing as a religion, granting official church status to the country’s Missionary Church of Kopimism, which boasts some 3,000 members.

It might sound like an early April Fool’s joke but Kopimism has been around in Sweden since 2010, when it was founded by members of the Young Pirates, the youth movement of Sweden’s controversial Pirate Party.

The Kopimi (pronounced “copy me”) movement has tried twice before to get official recognition, but had been rejected. The Swedish government finally recognized the Church of Kopimism after if formalized its mode of prayer and meditation.

According to the group’s website, Kopimism sees information as holy and copying and file sharing as a sacred acts akin to prayer. The website has been unavailable since it broke the news of its religious status. A message urged those interested in joining to “come back in a couple of…

In a few weeks Amelia Andersdotter will be the second Pirate Party member to take a seat at the European Parliament in Brussels. The 24-year-old Swede was voted in more than two years ago, but due to bureaucratic quibbles her official appointment was delayed.

When elected Andersdotter was only 21, but the now 24-year-old will still be the youngest member to hold a seat in the current parliament.

For the remainder of her term as MEP, which end in 2014, Andersdotter will focus on issues like competition in the telecommunication area. “European approaches to competition law need to be changed, at least a bit. Better sector adaptation, for instance. The lack of real control over vertical integration creates the situation where telcos (or media enterprises) own everything from the backbone cables to the music streaming service –…

The Massachusetts Election Division has approved the Massachusetts Pirate Party as a political designation, allowing voters in the state to register as a “Pirate.”

The party strives to increase government transparency, promote personal privacy, reinforce the spread of knowledge through copyright reform, and abolish patents.

“We live in a country founded on the ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” the Massachusetts Pirate Party said in a statement. “For many people, those ideals are not real. The Supreme Court and Congress have expanded the power of corporations and made them more powerful than people. Increasingly government officials ignore open meeting laws, make deals favorable to corporations behind closed doors and sell off our public information to private interests.”

Despite the frigid temperatures outside, the protesters assembled nearly naked groups at airports in Berlin, Frankfurt and Düsseldorf on Sunday afternoon. The participants stripped down to their underpants, marching behinds signs that read: “No need to scan us — we’re already naked.”

A statement on the party’s website said they opposed the new security scanners because they threaten the “private sphere and the personal rights of passengers.”

Germany’s data protection commissioner, Peter Schaar, warned officials last week not to rush the implementation of the full-body scanners at airport security stations following a failed terrorist attack in the US last month. Critics are concerned that the devices, which allow security personnel to see through clothing, have not been improved enough to protect passengers’ personal rights.