Jesus Christ and the free copy ethic

Roger Zelazny, the novel "The Prince of Light":

<sub>Nirriti put his hand on his shoulder.

“So your very being must be exhausted from the pain, listening to the blasphemy they implanted!”

“I don’t really like them, and they don’t bother me either.”
')
- Still would. But Sam - he did the same thing - multiplying the number of heresies, deeper burying the true Word ...

“Weapons, Renfrew,” Olwegg said. “Weapons and nothing more.” I am sure that he wanted to become a god no more than you or me.

- May be. But it would be better if he found another weapon. Though he wins, their souls are still lost.</sub>

The end of the quote.

These lines of the late science fiction writer best reflect the mood in which I plunged when aleksandrit twelve days ago (January 5, 2012) familiarized us all with the news that in Sweden file sharing and free copying in general is now considered as a separate religion, as new Church, as creed - kopimizm .

Is this change, this event more likely a victory of free copying over the copyrights of the rightholders, or does the triumph of copyimism more accurately testify to the heavy moral, ideological, religious and spiritual defeat of the copimists in this struggle?

To answer this question, we must first see the whole picture of events in its historical perspective.

To begin with, let us recall that the reserved line between ideological and religious arguments in the copying dispute was first crossed by not recent Swede copyimism. On the contrary, it was done by supporters of copyright and trade in rights, and quite a long time ago. It is appropriate to think that this feature was first violated when unlicensed computer copying was first widely declared theft . (I think it is reasonable to think that Bill Gates did it on February 3, 1976 in the fourth paragraph “ An Open Letter to Hobbyists ”, defending the business interests of his company, then called “Micro-Soft” through a hyphen.) Religiously, this means that unlicensed copying (performed instead of paying money to the supplier) was then declared a sin (violation of God's commandments “do not steal”, which is considered the eighth among the ten commandments in Orthodoxy, and the Lutheran and Roman Catholic church is considered the seventh ).

I see that the expectations of the right-sellers were fully justified: the statement of the equal sign between unlicensed copying and theft really became a heavy blow on the IT people from among Christians - a blow to their conscience. Even now, after more than thirty-five years, no-no and yes you will meet in a Christian forum a conversation (sometimes tens of pages ) about whether copyright infringement is a sin, whether it requires confession of sin and subsequent active repentance.

But after all, the copimists' response to this blow, their new religious weapon, looks unsatisfactory. Well, that is, for an unbeliever, it may be useful to pretend that copying is such a kind of church so that lawyers get less. But it is not befitting a Christian to deny Christ and change faith in the name of copying alone. It is extremely foolish to refuse to pay the right holder with money, but to be fully willing to pay with your soul. (And the whole situation does not look like an excuse for such deep despair as “we are another God-finder” in the fairy tale of Samoryadov .)

Instead, it would be enough to look more closely and understand the present (and not fictional) attitude of Christianity to copyright.

First of all, I’ll point out the following: every Christian who has ever read the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew or the sixth chapter of the gospel of Mark could have seen there that the Holy Apostles unequivocally offered Jesus to buy bread and fish for money, but He preferred to multiply they are free and distributed free of charge, regardless of the profit of the original supplier. Religion-Art.Ru website cites this scene in the depiction of the Russian painter Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov in the 1850 sketch “ Multiplication of breads ”:



This miracle of the Lord Jesus Christ clearly shows that He treated the free distribution of food in about the same way as modern-day hacker ethics (as explained by Eric Stephen Raymond) refers to the free copying of information. I believe that the modern world should quickly recall this on the eve of the time when biotechnology and nanotechnology will bring 3D printing to a state that is quite suitable for food reproduction, and much will depend on whether the ethics of humanity will be ready for this technological breakthrough. or else he would call him a sinful semblance of theft.

I foresee that this my thesis about the closeness of the actions of Jesus Christ and hacker ethics will seem too bold, impudent - in any case, unconventional. But this is only at first glance. Ask yourself first about this: who are the hackers at all? What does this word mean for us, what is the metaphor it contains?

The English word " hacker " literally means an employee acting with an ax on a tree ( in the hacker jargon dictionary it says: "someone who makes furniture with an ax" - it turns out that in Russian it is a furniture maker or rather a carpenter), but in slang meaning (now prevailing) means a competent and enthusiastic IT person who understands hacker values, and in a more general sense, any obsessed intellectual (the same dictionary cites the example of astronomy hacker, astronomy hacker). Perhaps this will become clearer in translation. Although there is no noun in Russian that is directly similar to the English “hacker”, however, there is a verb “ chop ”, which also literally means action with an ax on a tree, and figuratively means intellectual understanding and dedication: it’s enough to google “it cuts into "(As a phrase in quotes) to find phrases like" he cuts in cars "," he cuts in computers "," he cuts in algebra "," he cuts in technology "," he cuts in hieroglyphs ", and so on ; all of them are similar to the most common meaning of the term “hacker”, so for “astronomy hacker” in Russian there is a one-to-one correspondence “he cuts in astronomy”. (The same figurative meaning in Russian speech has the single-root question: “cut in?” In the meaning of “finally understood?”.)

More surprising is the fact that the translation was so convenient. The apparent proximity between the metaphors in English and Russian (and these are the languages ​​of peoples located at opposite ends of Europe!) Involuntarily suggests a certain antiquity of this image. Let, perhaps, not so gray-haired and immemorial antiquity, as the Indo-European roots of most European and a number of Central Asian dialects are endowed with - and at least such antiquity as in the events of the Gospel. Look closely at the Aramaic language of the Gospels, familiar to the modern viewer except in the film by Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ." Was there any such word in it, the literal and figurative meaning of which corresponded in exactly the same way as in modern English "hacker" and in Russian "chop" / "cut in"?

Even some twenty years ago, it would not be so easy for us to find the answer to this important question, however today the practice of computer unlicensed copying of information hurries us to help. We turn our views to one of the most respectable and age-old strongholds of this practice in Russia - the Moshkov Library, where we can easily open the book “The Holy Mystery ”, that is, the Russian translation of the book by Michael Bident, Richard Ley and Henry Lincoln “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail ”, published in 1982 in London. (Interestingly, the OCR was performed by the famous Russian science fiction writer Andrei Legostaev.) At the end of this book there are a lot of notes explaining certain circumstances mentioned in the main text; The most interesting for us is the one hundred and fifteenth note, in which it is not difficult to read that the Aramaic word " naggar ", literally meaning "carpenter" or "artisan", also had the figurative meaning "erudite" ("educated person") and is even used in this meaning in the Talmud. The authors of the “Sacred Mystery” do not doubt that in this sense this word should also be understood in relation to Jesus Christ (in the sixth chapter of the Gospel of Mark, for example), and the literal translation is incorrect.

But we, two paragraphs above, just said that in English there is just such a word, which literally means carpenter (craftsman in wood), and in portable - an erudite intellectual. For the Aramaic term " naggar " there is no better analogue than this word, which closely corresponds to both literal and figurative meanings.

"Hacker."

Jesus Christ not only acted in accordance with the hacker ethics of free copying of benefits, but also was called a hacker in the Gospel.

The strength of this thesis (as well as simplicity and symmetry of reasoning, basing it on well-known evangelical circumstances) is quite sufficient to see how fatally and badly the Swedes made a mistake. No one should betray the faith of Christ in the name of the new Copimist dogma.

But for me there is nothing new in this thesis - I even expressed it, albeit not in such a detailed form, in my interview in 2006. What other reasoning is appropriate to add to it today? Well, for example, it can be shown that not only Jesus Christ acted in the past in accordance with the hacker ethic, but the opposite is true: under certain conditions, at the time of the end of the world, it would be beneficial for the Antichrist to join the traders and act like a copyrighter.

In recent decades, the world has witnessed the rapid growth of the term of copyright, which in some countries has already reached (or is ready to achieve) a hundred years from the date of the author’s death. It is possible to predict with cynical hostility that if this process does not stop, but begins to grow with the same strength, then the lobbying and propaganda pressure of right-selling organizations will sooner or later lead to the fact that the term of copyright will be extended not only in the future, but also in the past : acting under the good pretext of encouraging the heirs of great people, legislators will adopt a law on the gradual re-privatization of works already in the public domain due to the limitation of the death of their authors, and will start the process beyond kupka pravotvortshami from the heirs of exclusive rights to the works of the first beginning of the XX century, then the end of the XIX century, then the beginning of the XIX century, and so on. Gumilev, Dostoevsky, Nekrasov, Aksakov, Pushkin, Lomonosov. Baudelaire, Poe, Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, von Eschenbach. Einstein, Maxwell, Newton, da Vinci, Bacon, Archimedes. Hundreds of thousands and millions of works of world literature, painting, drama, philosophy and science are waiting, perhaps, for their patents, their right holders and "effective owners with benign genes" - of course, now all this seems to us as wild and blasphemous as the Soviet The people of the 1980s had to introduce themselves to the Chubais mortgage auctions of the 1990s - however, unlike them, we must have a head on our shoulders and a willingness to foresee and prevent this probable event.

A copyrighted apocalypse is inevitable when the term of the posthumous action of copyright is two thousand years - which means it will affect the times of the Gospel. The question of the heir of Christ - the person who one of all mankind can declare the Holy Gospels to be derivative works and have the right, in the eyes of the law, to forbid their distribution and preaching the Word of God to Christians of the whole Earth, will come up in full growth. When he does this, you will recognize that he is the Antichrist. But it will be too late.

The idea of ​​the Antichrist precisely as the heir of Christ is a thought, I must say, far from new.

The book by Michael Bident, Richard Ley and Henry Lincoln “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail” that I have already used is a journalistic investigation, quite extensive and with many historical sources, the essence of which boils down to one thesis: a number of historical events, works of art (in particular , literature and painting), legends, rituals and documents may indicate that for many centuries of European history there existed one or several secret societies, equally political and religious united by the fact that they all acted under the influence of the belief that Jesus Christ was once married and left offspring belonging to the Jewish race, later married to several royal dynasties of Europe and ready to acquire earthly power over time. The authors of this book call one of these secret societies — the Priory of Zion — and claim that among the Grand Masters there once were (in an impenetrable secret) such famous intellectuals as Nicholas Flamel, Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo.

I even probably could not retell all these theses: they have long been known to the modern reader and the viewer thanks to the appearance in 2003 of Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code (an adventure novel, very much based on the work of Bident, Lei and Lincoln and even mentioning their book) and the subsequent Hollywood film adaptation of it. Some science fiction lovers might even notice that Brown should not be viewed as the only or the first, but only as the most successful popularizer of these authors' ideas, because as early as 1997, the adventure novels of Vladimir Sverzhin published in the Eksmo publishing house (this is a pseudonym; his surname is Fidelman), whose characters operate in the Middle Ages and meet the descendants of Christ and their accomplices from among the Knights of the Knights Templar. It is worth noting that the Templars are explicitly mentioned in the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (the authors of which wanted to show that the founders of the Priory of Zion and this order were interconnected and had a common goal); their order to modern youth is probably best known from the romantic novel by Walter Scott " Ivanhoe " (which is named the Order of the Knights of the Temple of Zion).

Michael Bijent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln devoted an entire chapter of their work to reviewing the “ Protocols of the Elders of Zion ” and suggest that the despot of Zion blood mentioned in them hints at a Jewish racial descendant of Christ, a contender for leading the world government. Unfortunately, these three authors have a diminished (almost caricature) and incorrect view of the role of the “Protocols” in Russia; but it should be noted that not only these our contemporaries, but also Russian Orthodox writer Sergey Alexandrovich Nilus (the first publisher of the full text of the Protocols) gained a deep conviction about the relationship of this topic with the arrival of the Antichrist and appropriately titled his work (“The Antichrist as close political opportunity ", 1905).

It probably doesn’t matter which of you is and how convinced you are of these views, of which many or even all are much more controversial and heretical and far less interconnected than my own above-mentioned arguments about the hacking of Christ. Why, and not your own conviction has real meaning. But watch the actions of those individuals who suspect that they can be truly passionate about this (or other) heresy and gradually prepare either the triumph of the retroactive right trade, or the immediate arrival of the Antichrist. Watch also for those actions that have significant symbolic or ritual significance within the framework of this cryptoconspirological theory, the historical roots of which are much deeper and wider, and the consequences are much more interesting than such a replica as copyimism.

Pay attention, for example, to the following: the above-mentioned Bill Gates (that is, the person who for the first time widely widely declared unlicensed computer copying as a theft ) placed fragments of Windows 98 acquired at an auction in more than 30,000 on one of the screensavers of Windows 98 000 Leicester Code , which has since been considered the most expensive book ever bought or sold in human history. (Exceeding in this parameter, for example, any copy of the Gospel.) This manuscript is the most famous of the thirty diaries of Leonardo da Vinci.

Diary of the Grand Master of Priory of Zion.