Meh. Empty program doesn't replicate itself. It's similar to recent rule-nitpick discussion about selling for 0$. Selling for 0$ isn't selling and nothing isn't replicating itself.

Definition of replicate is: to repeat or copy (something) exactly

Empty program doesn't copy or repeat anything. Entry rejected.

EDIT: It's not reddit, downvotes doesn't go here for disagreeing. The problem is posed in natural language and it has its own rules. In natural language (at least in English) doing nothing isn't copying or replicating. You may check the dictionaries.

Next time someone will claim claim 1 million sales: million nothings for 0 dollars to nobodies.

EDIT (to other child)

Yes, empty set is subset of other sets but that's because the definition of subset. Copy or replicate in natural language (in which the problem is posed) mean something entirely different.

That tradition goes back a long, long way. When Plato defined Man as "A featherless biped," someone showed him a plucked chicken.

A great tradition.

Speaking of rule abuse, I love this recent entry, which uses the IOCCC's own tool to calculate the size... and abuses a bug in it! It's mainly for a joke, though there IS a huge program-size abuse in the custom BIOS the program uses.

http://www.ioccc.org/2013/cable3/hint.html

    *RULE 2 ABUSE DISCLAIMER*

    - cable3.c is 4043 bytes in length (half an 8086)
    - iocccsize -i < cable3.c returns 1977 (the year the
      4.77 MHz 8086 CPU was announced)
    - Therefore, any suspicions the judges may have regarding
      rule 2 non-compliance may be well-intentioned but
      are groundless.
    - Nonetheless, the author would like to apologise to the
      judges for the one-big-block-of-code nature of this entry,
      which turned out to be unavoidable. Hopefully the joys
      of this entry will make up for its shortcomings.