Copyleft

CopyleftAndrés GuadamuzSCRIPT Centre for Research in IP and Technology LawUniversity of Edinburgh

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A word of caution...







Realities

Copyleft basics

Copyleft licences

Licence grant: gives users permission to use, copy, republish, redistribute, make the work available to the public, etc.

Copyleft clause: Most important element in the licence. Allows modifications to the work as long as the modifications are released with the same licence.

AKA: Viral clause (controversial), or Share-alike clause.

Copyleft clause

“2(b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.” GPL v2.

Licence ecology

Copyleft Non-copyleft Hybrid

•GPL•Free Documentation Licence•EUPL

•BSD•Apache•Mozilla

•Creative Commons•LGPL

Copyleft popularityCopyleft Other Non-Copyleft Public Domain

Hancock T, Free Software Magazine, 9/3 2008

Creative CommonsCopyleft Non-copyleft Publc Domain

Legal issues

Litigation

Jacobsen v Katzer 535 F. 3d 137 (Artistic License, non-copyleft.

GPLviolations.org:

Sitecom (Landgericht Muenchen No. 21 0 6123/04)

Fortinet (Landgericht Muenchen No. 21 0 7240/05).

Caldera Sys., Inc. v. Int'l Bus. Machs. Corp (D. Utah 2003) (No. 03-CV-0294).

Distribution chains

Author / Owner

Licensee / Derivative

Licensee / User

Licensee / Distributor

Derivative User User Distributor

Derivative User

Trouble with popular works?

Author

Licence complexity

More than 150 OSS-certified licences.

6 types of Creative Commons licences, 2 copyleft.

Compatibility: distribution of works released under two or three different licences.

Must create map of compatible licences.

Semantic web

Concluding...

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Documents

Copyleft