Copy The Way You Say
Copyleft is a term used in the software development community. It started as a rebellion, of sorts, by programmers who wanted a shared community of software, developed by the community, and free fro all to tinker with and modify.
Ironically, the very copyrigt system that these programmers felt needed to be discarded is the one that allows them to accomplish their goal. So it makes a good example of the strength of our basic copyright scheme.
An author of a work automatically owns the copyright to it. The author has the right to decide where, when and how that work is used.
If the author wants other people, any people, to use the work without having to ask permission and without having to pay, the work can be placed in the public domain. Public domain works are owned by the public, so no permissions are needed to use the work and no royalties or other payments need to be paid to an owner.
The software programmers didn’t quite like this approach, because when a public domain work is sufficiently modified so as to become a new work, a new copyright attaches - and the new owner might not put the new work back into the public domain. The programmers wanted the software to continue to be accessible and to continue to be modified in all its subsequent forms.
So they came up with a copyright license that gives automatic permission to any person to do anything with the software, so long as any derivative work continues to be licensed under this free access policy. A person who modified a free access piece of software and then held it as proprietary property available only upon purchase would be violating the original license, and therefor subject to copyright infringement claims.
The programmers called their copyright license a “copyleft.” As far as I can tell, this was primarily as a statement against what they felt was a restrictive copyright system.
Ironically, the copyright system allowed them to accomplish their goals.
Copyright is not the villain.
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