Copyleft
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The following article is published as:
Friedman, Ken. 2002. “Copyleft.” In The Encyclopedia of New Media. Steve
Jones, editor. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, Inc.,
96-97.
This article is copyright © by Sage Publications, 2002.
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Copyleft
Copyleft is a license granting general permission to copy and reproduce
intellectual property. The term “copyleft” was created to reverse the
idea of copyright. Understanding copyleft requires understanding the
basic aspects of copyright.
Copyright reserves exclusive control of copyrighted property to its
creator. The creator decides what rights to grant others. Each grant of
rights is established under a specific agreement. The creator of a
copyrighted work may elect to transfer copyright ownership to another
individual or to a business. In this case, the new copyright owner takes
over all rights of copyright control, and decides how to manage those
rights.
Copyleft is a general license agreement granted by a copyright owner
permitting anyone to freely use copyrighted property under specific
terms.
Common terms of a copyleft license state that a copylefted work is
freely available to all potential users. Copylefted software allows
users to run, modify, copy, and distribute software on the condition
that the source code remains is open and publicly available. Copyleft
usually states that copylefted software must passed on with a copyleft
license requiring successive users to accept and transmit copyleft. The
license further requires modifications or improvements to copylefted
software to be transmitted under copyleft.
Copylefted content is transmitted in much the same way and under similar
agreements.
Some argue that copyleft involves placing copyrightable material in the
public domain. Others argue that copyleft is a specific license granted
under copyright law, and they argue that the international statutes
governing copyright law are the mechanisms that establish and protect
copyleft.
In one sense, copyleft is a return to the earliest ideas of intellectual
property. Copyleft embodies three traditional principles governing
intellectual property before the industrial revolution.
Before these laws, intellectual property was a common good based on
three principles.
The first principle is that knowledge builds on prior knowledge.
Innovation embodies prior art, and even revolutionary ideas build on the
knowledge that successful revolutions overturn.
The second principle is that no one can truly own knowledge. Knowledge
grows with use as a common property that increases through circulation
while shrinking with disuse. This view asserts that we can only own
knowledge by sharing it while knowledge as private property is a
contradiction in terms.
The third principle is tradition. The traditional approach to knowledge
calls for preservation and transmission. Traditional knowledge grows
incrementally, and new knowledge must incorporate earlier knowledge to
be acceptable. Traditions of knowledge build on precedent, including
law, theology, philosophy, and mathematics. Modern science and
scholarship also build on precedent by incorporating earlier knowledge
or refuting it.
Many cultures respect the traditional view of knowledge. This gives rise
to different views on intellectual property. Japanese and Chinese
scholars, for example, often treat scholarly ideas as a shared heritage
that demands respectful incorporation into their writing. While this was
also the practice in the West before the Renaissance, Western scholars
today view some traditional forms of incorporation as plagiarism.
While Western property law allowed for the growth of personal property
rights for all forms of property, some cultures that accept personal
property for physical goods follow traditional law for intellectual
property.
The development of capitalism and banking in fifteenth century Venice
led to the first patent law of 1474. In 1709, England enacted the first
copyrigIn recent years, however, two ideas challenged the idea of private
property rights in mental creation.
Knowledge develops in a complex sequence of interactions in communities
of practice and learning, and in larger societies and economies.
Intellectual property is inevitably predicated on prior work.
Individuals contribute to the whole, shaping variations and giving
specific form to the statements that constitute intellectual property.
The philosophical position of copyleft is that communities have rights
in knowledge along with individuals. Moreover, copyleft asserts that
copyright itself is often used against individuals by a legal system
that favors powerful interests over individual creators.
One of the important predecessors of copyleft was Buckminster Fuller.
Fuller copyrighted and patented his work both to document his creation
and to preserve the work for humankind while protecting it against
monopoly control by the legal system.
Soon, artists began to experiment with notions of general copyright and
anti-copyright. In the early 1960s, Fluxus publisher and impresario
George Maciunas promulgated a publishing and performance strategy
similar to the concept of the general public license that would emerge
later. Other Fluxus artists began to circulate event scores and
program-like project notes with specific permissions for use and reprint
on condition of transmitting the copyright conditions. In the early
1970s, British Fluxus artist David Mayor developed an anti-copyright
philosophy, complete with an anti-copyright mark in the form of a tiny
(x) in a circle.
Copyleft itself probably began in the work of MIT computer expert
Richard Stallman. In 1983, Stallman started an open source programming
project called GNU. He created the first general public license to
govern the use of GNU, keeping it and its derivatives open and freely
available.
Today, the concept of copyleft is central to many of the projects. Many
actors in the information society, from software programmers and digital
artists to content providers, composers, and designers, use it.
Where copyright protects society’s interests in invention and creativity
by providing individual incentives through copyright control, copyleft
protects social interests in knowledge creation by vesting copyright
control in a large, general community.
In one sense, it extends the benevolent hacker knowledge ethos that
asserts, “Information wants to be free.” In another, it returns to the
traditional concept of knowledge. This concept treats general ideas and
their specific forms as a common heritage. Mental creations build on
what has come before. They shape the platform of what comes next.
Copyleft is a bridging mechanism developed to encourage the growth of
social knowledge and common good.
-- Ken Friedman
Bibliography
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Accessed 2001 June 2.
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Accessed 2001 June 2.
Further Reading
Anderson, Judy. 1998. Plagiarism, Copyright Violation, and Other Thefts
of Intellectual Property. An Annotated Bibliography with a Lengthy
Introduction. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, Inc.,
Publishers.
Buranen, Lisa, and Alice M. Roy. 1999. Perspectives on Plagiarism and
Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World. Albany, New York: State
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Accessed 2001 June 2.
Copyright and Copyleft. [Online resource collection.]
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Internet/copyrightleft.html
Accessed 2001 June 2.
Eisenstein, Elizabeth. 1983. The printing revolution in early modern
Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eisenstein, Elizabeth. 1979. The printing press as an agent of change.
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Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-Jean Martin. 1976. The coming of the book. The
impact of printing 1450-1800. London: Verso.
Friedman, Ken with James Lewes. 1992. “Fluxus: Global Community, Human
Dimensions.” Fluxus: A Conceptual Country. Estera Milman, editor.
[Visible Language, vol. 26, nos. 1/2.] Providence: Rhode Island School
of Design, pp. 154-179. [Special issue devoted to Fluxus, also
exhibition catalogue]
Fuller, Buckminster. 1969. Utopia or oblivion: the prospects for
humanity. New York: Bantam Books.
Fuller, R. Buckminster. 1981. Critical path. New York: St. Martin’s
Press.
Goldstein, Paul. Copyright’s Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celestial
Jukebox. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995.
Huddleston, G. Roger. 1910. “Scriptorium.” The Catholic Encyclopedia.
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Accessed 2001 March 2.
Johnson, Emer D. 1970. History of Libraries in the Western World.
Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, Inc.
LaFollette, Marcel C. 1992. Stealing into Print. Fraud, Plagiarism, and
Misconduct in Scientific Publishing. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Rosenberg, Donald K. “Copyleft and the Religious Wars of the 21st
Century.” [A talk for the Research Triangle Computer Law Roundtable, May
1997, revised for presentation at the Linux Expo in Durham, N.C., May
1998.] Stromian Technologies. http://www.stromian.com/copyleft.htm
(2 June 2001).
Schwartz, Hillel. 1996. The culture of the Copy. New York: Zone Books.
Tate Gallery Archives. “Mayor, Fluxshoe, Beau Geste Press”
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Accessed 2001 June 2.
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