Copyright vs. Copyleft: a Short Introduction to These Licenses

Gutenberg’s development of the printing press represented a revolution in the spread of knowledge. Even if by this time copying a book involved an important investment of materials and labour, the later ability to reproduce large quantities of texts and with no control over who did them, publishers began to worry about this fact. In 1710, the British Statute of Anne represented the first modern concept of copyright which gave exclusive rights to authors during a period of 28 years.

Copyright is the exclusive right granted to the author of an original work, including the right to authorise or ban the publication, distribution and adaptation of that work. Copyright only lasts for a certain time period after which the work is said to enter the public domain. Copyright applies to any expressible form of an idea or information that is substantive and discrete and fixed in a medium. Some jurisdictions also recognize «moral rights» of the creator of a work, such as the right to be credited for the work. Copyright is described under the umbrella term intellectual property along with patents and trademarks.

Copyleft is a play on the word copyright to describe the practice of using copyright law to remove restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions of a work for others and requiring that the same freedoms be preserved in modified versions. In other words, the copyleft allows users to reproduce, modify, or adapt the original creation in the way they want. This way new versions and publications are created. However, the copyleft obliges that any new creation based on the original must also be covered by the same copyleft licence.

The GNU General Public License, originally written by Richard Stallman, was the first copyleft license to see extensive use, and continues to dominate the licensing of copylefted software. Creative Commons, a non-profit organization founded byLawrence Lessig, provides a similar license called ShareAlike.

Instead of allowing a work to fall completely into the public domain (where no copyright restrictions are imposed), copyleft allows an author to impose some, but not all, copyright restrictions on those who want to engage in activities that would otherwise be considered copyright infringement. Under copyleft, copyright infringement can be avoided if the would-be infringer perpetuates the same copyleft scheme. For this reason copyleft licenses are also commonly known as «reciprocal» or «viral» licenses.

Common practice for using copyleft is to codify the copying terms for a work with a license. Any such license typically gives each person possessing a copy of the work the same freedoms as the author, including (from the Free Software Definition):

0. the freedom to use the work,

1. the freedom to study the work,

2. the freedom to copy and share the work with others,

3. the freedom to modify the work, and the freedom to distribute modified and therefore derivative works.

These freedoms do not ensure that a derivative work will be distributed under the same liberal terms. In order for the work to be truly copyleft, the license has to ensure that the author of a derived work can only distribute such works under the same or equivalent license.

In addition to restrictions on copying, copyleft licenses address other possible impediments. These include ensuring the rights cannot be later revoked and requiring the work and its derivatives to be provided in a form that facilitates modification. In software, this requires that the source code of the derived work is made available together with the software itself.

Sources:

*Copyright. (2010, January 28). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 19:56, January 28, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Copyright&oldid=340580032

*Copyleft. (2010, January 26). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 19:56, January 28, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Copyleft&oldid=340151367