Copyleft

*Study the principle of copyleft and write an analysis about its three variants (strong, weak, none) with real-life examples.



*Study the principle of copyleft and write an analysis about its three variants (strong, weak, none) with real-life examples.



The most restrictive variant of copyleft license is GNU General Public License, GNU GPL. In fact is as restrictive as a copyright - but in different way. The whole idea of the copyleft is based on the same presumption as copyright - the idea of intellectual property. Copyleft licenses are an attempt to use existing copyright laws to ensure a work remains freely available, so it´s in fact attempt to change restrictive system of protecting Intellectual property, to change status in which authors are using the law to prohibit others from using and sharing IP, to completely opposite - strong copyleft prohibit usage under more permissive licenses... and of course under copyright. This idea is to strict, that there is (was in the beginning) danger to earmark it self out of the usage, in the times ruled by copyright. It´s also the reason, why were published another licenses more permissive - GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), Mozilla Public License (MPL).

BSD licence are in the middle - between copyleft and copyright. In fact just this license refuse, or may be better say don´t use, ignore, idea of intellectual property.

Special case are Creative commons licenses - it´s simply all spectrum of left side of left conception of IP - from really restrictive Cc-sa Share Alike, CC-nd No Derivative Works, Cc-nc Noncommercial to Cc-by Attribution, which is almost as permissive as BSD license.

We can imagine it as a spectrum... copyleft is counterbalance of copyright.

Stalman criticize the pirate movement, that it subvert the attempt create free software because it threaten not just copyright, but also copyleft - cause it refuse whole idea of IP... the main point of this criticism is, that canceling of idea of IP doesn't offer any guarantee for free software to not be abused as a proprietary on - on the one hand it´s true, but on the another - the rejection of IP is just necessary next step. And of course is necessary to settle new rules somehow to be friendly for free software - I guess it will be main challenge for pirate parties in next few years.

"I support these changes, in general; but the specific combination chosen by the Swedish Pirate Party backfires ironically in the special case of free software. I'm sure that they did not intend to hurt free software, but that's what would happen."