Interesting discussion of notion of “copyleft”: The Great Giveaway: Good ideas are worth money. So why are hard headed operators giving them away for free?, by Graham Lawton, NewScientist.com. It’s interesting to note that though the (often leftist) advocates of the copyleft idea seem to brand themselves as radical opponents of copyright (and private property, capitalism, commercialism, profit motive, etc.), the very notion of copyleft requires there to be copyright. This is because copyleft is really just a special type of copyright license, one that gives users of a copyrighted work virtually unfettered permission to use/copy/distribute/modify the work–but only “on the condition that” similar “copyleft” is given in the subsequent work. Without copyright, there could be no copyleft. While copyleft is an admittedly clever use of copyright, advocates of copyleft are also necessarily advocates of copyright.
