J.B. Nicholson-Owens – Some notes on copyleft
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Some notes on copyleft
By J.B. Nicholson-Owens? (jbn@forestfield.org, Champaign, IL) 2.257 words
In 1984, Richard Stallman began a project to make a completely free computer operating system called GNU. GNU would be free not necessarily in the monetary sense — that you can get a copy of the OS without payment — but instead, GNU would come with certain inalienable rights. Anyone who has GNU can run it, copy it, modify it, or distribute copies of it to anyone they want at any time.
Stallman wanted to make sure that the freedoms he wanted to give others with the system were not lost when people distributed the software. You may have a similar concern for your copyrighted works and you want to secure certain freedoms for derivative works in order to make and preserve a community of people who can share and build on the work you're licensing to them. Copyleft can help you do this. Copyright law in the US allows the copyright holder to place conditions on derivative works. Copyleft leverages this power to require that derivative works be licensed a certain way.
Some of the most interesting work in copyright licensing is being done with regard to licensing computer software. Recently organizations have started up which use ideas from computer software licenses (like copyleft) and make them work in other areas of endeavor. There is much to learn by examining how these ideas got started so I'll begin a lot of the framing of the debate around the issued faced in computer software development.
The GNU General Public License — the most popular copyleft license
GNU is in a class of software known as "free software", software that gives you the freedom to share and modify the programs at any time for any reason and distribute the software to anyone. The license for much of the GNU operating system (called the GNU General Public License, or GNU GPL for short) grants the freedoms of free software and so do a number of other free software licenses (like the newer Berkeley Systems Distribution, or BSD, license, and the MIT X11 license) and so would placing a program into the public domain.
But the GNU GPL is different from other free software licenses (or the public domain) because the GNU GPL uses a mechanism called "copyleft" to make sure the freedoms of free software are guaranteed for derivative works as well.
Works in the public domain require no license to use in any way; anyone is free to distribute or build upon works in the public domain and license the new parts of the derivative work in any way they wish.
Other licenses (including the new BSD license and the MIT X11 license) grant a great deal of flexibility for the recipient of the covered program. Derivatives of these programs can be distributed under the same license or any other license. The limitations in these licenses restrict using the copyright holder's name in promotional materials, there are no strong restrictions on distributing or building on the program.
The GNU GPL's authors did not like these licenses or placing their programs in the public domain because the GNU project's goals are to give all computer users software freedom. For the GNU project, placing their programs in the public domain or granting the ability to sub-license the work meant that they could not make sure that the freedoms to share and modify the programs would be copied along with the software no matter where the software traveled. My copy of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC — a software development program) may have come from the GNU project directly and therefore it would be free software for me, but if GCC were in the public domain I might choose to modify it and distribute my modified version to someone else minus the freedoms I had. Worse yet, if GCC were in the public domain, I could choose to distribute my improved version under terms that make those improvements unavailable to GNU users or the developers of the original GCC. The folks at the GNU project used copyright law in a novel way to avoid this problem.
They included a clause in the GNU GPL that requires any distributed copy of the software, with or without changes, to be licensed under only the GNU GPL. Thus whatever the GNU GPL grants would also be granted for derivative works as well. This is the simplest way to implement a copyleft: require that derivative works must also be licensed under the same license. Under the GNU GPL, if anyone tries to distribute the software under more restrictive terms, the distributor has committed copyright infringement and the license to distribute the covered program at all is void.
How does copyleft help me make and sustain a commons?
If everyone who gets a copy of copylefted free software (such as GNU GPL-covered software) has the freedom to share and modify it that creates a commons of software. Everyone is free to share in this commons but nobody can take something out of the commons by building upon a program and preventing others from distributing improved software based on the GNU GPL-licensed software.
The GNU GPL became the preeminent license in the free software community; it helped create the free software community. Years before there was another movement called "open source", the GNU GPL was working for the public defending what Professor Eben Moglen, chief counsel for the Free Software Foundation and co-author of the GNU GPL, would later call "the single greatest technical reference library on Planet Earth". He is not overstating the matter. At a talk at Harvard, Prof. Eben Moglen said:
“The reason I say that is that free software is the only corpus of information fixed in a tangible form, through which anyone, anywhere, can go from naiveté to the state of the art in a great technical subject — what computers can be made to do — solely by consulting material that is freely available for adaptation and reuse, in any way that she or he may want.
We enable learning all over the world by permitting people to experiment, not with toys, but with the actual real stuff on which all the good work is done.
For that purpose, we are engaged in making an educational system and a human capital improvement system which brings about the promise of encouraging the diffusion of our science and useful art in a way which contributes to the perfectibility of human beings."
There is a real and vibrant community working on building free software. Some do it for profit; many (perhaps most) do it on a volunteer basis. But free software is shared under a variety of free software licenses and the GNU GPL is the most widely used license (judging by the number of GNU GPL-covered programs at many software archives online).
Moving beyond software with copyleft licenses
We can take copyleft in other directions too. The concept of copyleft is not inextricably tied to computer software. The Creative Commons organization has made a number of licenses that are intended for copyrighted works other than computer software. Some of their licenses include a copyleft (which they call a "ShareAlike" provision; the word comes from the phrase "share and share alike" which is a good brief way of stating what a copyleft does). The 2.0 revisions of the Creative Commons licenses implement a copyleft by allowing the licensee to distribute derivative works under the same license.
The Libre Society ("Libre" being French for "free" as in freedom) is a cultural movement that advocates sharing art, music, and other cultural expression as a response to the "constellation of interests which seek to increase their ownership and control of creativity" (a quote from the Libre Society Manifesto). The Libre Society uses copyleft because of its power to legally enforce sharing with those who want to share and exclude those who wish to divide up the commons for ownership.
Copyleft concerns
There are some practical shortcomings to a copyleft license that you should know about before you use works licensed under one or license your copyrighted works under one.
Copyleft licenses are incompatible with each other. You cannot combine two works that are each licensed under different copyleft licenses. For example, it is not legally possible to make a new work by combining a GNU GPL-covered program and a work licensed under any of the Creative Commons ShareAlike? licenses. Each of these licenses implements copyleft by requiring that distributed derivative works must be licensed under the same license. It's not possible to simultaneously satisfy the requirements of both of the licenses. This is a typical problem with copyleft licenses.
Not all copylefts are alike; some copyleft licenses are weaker than others. The GNU Lesser General Public License (also called the GNU LGPL, formerly known as the GNU Library GPL) is so named because it does a lesser job of defending software freedom than the GNU GPL. Under the LGPL, one can make proprietary derivative programs — programs one is not allowed to inspect, share, or modify.
In the software world, there is ongoing debate between the licensors who use the new BSD license (and other non-copyleft licenses) and those who use strongly copylefted licenses (such as the GNU GPL). Part of the Wikipedia entry on copyleft describes the debate thusly:
"It is sometimes argued that the copyleft licenses attempt to maximize the freedom of all potential recipients in the future (freedom from the creation of proprietary software), while non-copyleft free software licenses maximize the freedom of the initial recipient (freedom to create proprietary software)."
But I take issue with this description because I don't think giving someone the ability to close off someone else's ability to study, share, and modify a program is a freedom. I maintain that that is a power (the difference between freedom and power being that freedoms mainly affect what you can do for yourself and powers mainly affect what you can do to other people). The BSD licensors are making a gift to society, a genuine contribution to everyone and all organizations. But I would echo Richard Stallman's warning which discourages treating corporations like charities.
Finally, keep in mind the purpose of the work — if your work is intended to make something popular at any cost, you may want to consider trading away the ability to maintain a community around the work in exchange for a chance at increased popularity. This is why the LGPL exists; the GNU project takes a calculated risk when they use this license. They encourage you to not use the LGPL in most cases because the circumstances where you would want to forgo the community-building aspects of the GNU GPL are so rare.
In another example, the creators of Vorbis made this tradeoff. In November 1998, Fraunhofer Gesellschaft announced that they would begin charging license fees to use the MP3 audio compression scheme. Fraunhofer held patents that covered any possible implementation of an MP3 encoder or decoder. This effectively prevented any developer from distributing any MP3 encoder or decoder in any country that observes so-called "software patents" (patents which cover algorithms used in the creation of computer software) without getting permission from Fraunhofer Gesellschaft. Following this announcement, Christopher Montgomery began work on a replacement audio compression scheme called "Vorbis". Other programmers joined Montgomery on this work and in mid-2002 a stable version of the Vorbis codec was released.
In order to help make Vorbis popular, the specification for Vorbis was placed into the public domain and libraries which do the work of encoding and decoding Vorbis data were released under the new BSD license. Vorbis-related tools were released under the GNU GPL that allows anyone to share in distributed improvements to the tools without impeding the file format from being used in an unlimited way.
The term of copyright
Making and sustaining a creative commons (if you'll pardon the pun) is incredibly important, particularly in light of one US Supreme Court decision — Eldred v. Ashcroft.
Eldred v. Ashcroft told us (among other things) that everlasting copyright is a reality so long as there are media corporations eager to obtain it in a particular way. Retroactively increasing the term of copyright can be done every 20 years or so and by doing this one can achieve what would be unconstitutional to obtain outright – an everlasting term of copyright.
This matters for those who want to participate in a creative commons because it means we will need a way to use copyright law to ensure our ability to share with all those who want to share with us. By using a copylefted license we can do this and when we are as careful as the Free Software Foundation is in putting together licenses like the GNU GPL, we too can make our commons a legally defensible reality that should (unfortunately) last as long as copyright does.
I do not endorse the idea of a longer term of copyright. We, as a society, lose far more than we gain with everlasting copyright (for example, some works which are under corporate control will not be preserved if doing the work of preservation is not profitable). But so long as we have to suffer with the current overly long term of copyright, we might as well use copyright law to our mutual benefit.
Copyright 2004 J.B. Nicholson-Owens?
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
J.B. Nicholson-Owens? hosts "Digital Citizen" on WEFT 90.1 FM every other Wednesday from 8-10PM, consults using free software, and works at a Champaign, IL ISP which rebuilds computers for the poor.
By J.B. Nicholson-Owens? (jbn@forestfield.org, Champaign, IL) 2.257 words
In 1984, Richard Stallman began a project to make a completely free computer operating system called GNU. GNU would be free not necessarily in the monetary sense — that you can get a copy of the OS without payment — but instead, GNU would come with certain inalienable rights. Anyone who has GNU can run it, copy it, modify it, or distribute copies of it to anyone they want at any time.
Stallman wanted to make sure that the freedoms he wanted to give others with the system were not lost when people distributed the software. You may have a similar concern for your copyrighted works and you want to secure certain freedoms for derivative works in order to make and preserve a community of people who can share and build on the work you're licensing to them. Copyleft can help you do this. Copyright law in the US allows the copyright holder to place conditions on derivative works. Copyleft leverages this power to require that derivative works be licensed a certain way.
Some of the most interesting work in copyright licensing is being done with regard to licensing computer software. Recently organizations have started up which use ideas from computer software licenses (like copyleft) and make them work in other areas of endeavor. There is much to learn by examining how these ideas got started so I'll begin a lot of the framing of the debate around the issued faced in computer software development.
The GNU General Public License — the most popular copyleft license
GNU is in a class of software known as "free software", software that gives you the freedom to share and modify the programs at any time for any reason and distribute the software to anyone. The license for much of the GNU operating system (called the GNU General Public License, or GNU GPL for short) grants the freedoms of free software and so do a number of other free software licenses (like the newer Berkeley Systems Distribution, or BSD, license, and the MIT X11 license) and so would placing a program into the public domain.
But the GNU GPL is different from other free software licenses (or the public domain) because the GNU GPL uses a mechanism called "copyleft" to make sure the freedoms of free software are guaranteed for derivative works as well.
Works in the public domain require no license to use in any way; anyone is free to distribute or build upon works in the public domain and license the new parts of the derivative work in any way they wish.
Other licenses (including the new BSD license and the MIT X11 license) grant a great deal of flexibility for the recipient of the covered program. Derivatives of these programs can be distributed under the same license or any other license. The limitations in these licenses restrict using the copyright holder's name in promotional materials, there are no strong restrictions on distributing or building on the program.
The GNU GPL's authors did not like these licenses or placing their programs in the public domain because the GNU project's goals are to give all computer users software freedom. For the GNU project, placing their programs in the public domain or granting the ability to sub-license the work meant that they could not make sure that the freedoms to share and modify the programs would be copied along with the software no matter where the software traveled. My copy of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC — a software development program) may have come from the GNU project directly and therefore it would be free software for me, but if GCC were in the public domain I might choose to modify it and distribute my modified version to someone else minus the freedoms I had. Worse yet, if GCC were in the public domain, I could choose to distribute my improved version under terms that make those improvements unavailable to GNU users or the developers of the original GCC. The folks at the GNU project used copyright law in a novel way to avoid this problem.
They included a clause in the GNU GPL that requires any distributed copy of the software, with or without changes, to be licensed under only the GNU GPL. Thus whatever the GNU GPL grants would also be granted for derivative works as well. This is the simplest way to implement a copyleft: require that derivative works must also be licensed under the same license. Under the GNU GPL, if anyone tries to distribute the software under more restrictive terms, the distributor has committed copyright infringement and the license to distribute the covered program at all is void.
How does copyleft help me make and sustain a commons?
If everyone who gets a copy of copylefted free software (such as GNU GPL-covered software) has the freedom to share and modify it that creates a commons of software. Everyone is free to share in this commons but nobody can take something out of the commons by building upon a program and preventing others from distributing improved software based on the GNU GPL-licensed software.
The GNU GPL became the preeminent license in the free software community; it helped create the free software community. Years before there was another movement called "open source", the GNU GPL was working for the public defending what Professor Eben Moglen, chief counsel for the Free Software Foundation and co-author of the GNU GPL, would later call "the single greatest technical reference library on Planet Earth". He is not overstating the matter. At a talk at Harvard, Prof. Eben Moglen said:
“The reason I say that is that free software is the only corpus of information fixed in a tangible form, through which anyone, anywhere, can go from naiveté to the state of the art in a great technical subject — what computers can be made to do — solely by consulting material that is freely available for adaptation and reuse, in any way that she or he may want.
We enable learning all over the world by permitting people to experiment, not with toys, but with the actual real stuff on which all the good work is done.
For that purpose, we are engaged in making an educational system and a human capital improvement system which brings about the promise of encouraging the diffusion of our science and useful art in a way which contributes to the perfectibility of human beings."
There is a real and vibrant community working on building free software. Some do it for profit; many (perhaps most) do it on a volunteer basis. But free software is shared under a variety of free software licenses and the GNU GPL is the most widely used license (judging by the number of GNU GPL-covered programs at many software archives online).
Moving beyond software with copyleft licenses
We can take copyleft in other directions too. The concept of copyleft is not inextricably tied to computer software. The Creative Commons organization has made a number of licenses that are intended for copyrighted works other than computer software. Some of their licenses include a copyleft (which they call a "ShareAlike" provision; the word comes from the phrase "share and share alike" which is a good brief way of stating what a copyleft does). The 2.0 revisions of the Creative Commons licenses implement a copyleft by allowing the licensee to distribute derivative works under the same license.
The Libre Society ("Libre" being French for "free" as in freedom) is a cultural movement that advocates sharing art, music, and other cultural expression as a response to the "constellation of interests which seek to increase their ownership and control of creativity" (a quote from the Libre Society Manifesto). The Libre Society uses copyleft because of its power to legally enforce sharing with those who want to share and exclude those who wish to divide up the commons for ownership.
Copyleft concerns
There are some practical shortcomings to a copyleft license that you should know about before you use works licensed under one or license your copyrighted works under one.
Copyleft licenses are incompatible with each other. You cannot combine two works that are each licensed under different copyleft licenses. For example, it is not legally possible to make a new work by combining a GNU GPL-covered program and a work licensed under any of the Creative Commons ShareAlike? licenses. Each of these licenses implements copyleft by requiring that distributed derivative works must be licensed under the same license. It's not possible to simultaneously satisfy the requirements of both of the licenses. This is a typical problem with copyleft licenses.
Not all copylefts are alike; some copyleft licenses are weaker than others. The GNU Lesser General Public License (also called the GNU LGPL, formerly known as the GNU Library GPL) is so named because it does a lesser job of defending software freedom than the GNU GPL. Under the LGPL, one can make proprietary derivative programs — programs one is not allowed to inspect, share, or modify.
In the software world, there is ongoing debate between the licensors who use the new BSD license (and other non-copyleft licenses) and those who use strongly copylefted licenses (such as the GNU GPL). Part of the Wikipedia entry on copyleft describes the debate thusly:
"It is sometimes argued that the copyleft licenses attempt to maximize the freedom of all potential recipients in the future (freedom from the creation of proprietary software), while non-copyleft free software licenses maximize the freedom of the initial recipient (freedom to create proprietary software)."
But I take issue with this description because I don't think giving someone the ability to close off someone else's ability to study, share, and modify a program is a freedom. I maintain that that is a power (the difference between freedom and power being that freedoms mainly affect what you can do for yourself and powers mainly affect what you can do to other people). The BSD licensors are making a gift to society, a genuine contribution to everyone and all organizations. But I would echo Richard Stallman's warning which discourages treating corporations like charities.
Finally, keep in mind the purpose of the work — if your work is intended to make something popular at any cost, you may want to consider trading away the ability to maintain a community around the work in exchange for a chance at increased popularity. This is why the LGPL exists; the GNU project takes a calculated risk when they use this license. They encourage you to not use the LGPL in most cases because the circumstances where you would want to forgo the community-building aspects of the GNU GPL are so rare.
In another example, the creators of Vorbis made this tradeoff. In November 1998, Fraunhofer Gesellschaft announced that they would begin charging license fees to use the MP3 audio compression scheme. Fraunhofer held patents that covered any possible implementation of an MP3 encoder or decoder. This effectively prevented any developer from distributing any MP3 encoder or decoder in any country that observes so-called "software patents" (patents which cover algorithms used in the creation of computer software) without getting permission from Fraunhofer Gesellschaft. Following this announcement, Christopher Montgomery began work on a replacement audio compression scheme called "Vorbis". Other programmers joined Montgomery on this work and in mid-2002 a stable version of the Vorbis codec was released.
In order to help make Vorbis popular, the specification for Vorbis was placed into the public domain and libraries which do the work of encoding and decoding Vorbis data were released under the new BSD license. Vorbis-related tools were released under the GNU GPL that allows anyone to share in distributed improvements to the tools without impeding the file format from being used in an unlimited way.
The term of copyright
Making and sustaining a creative commons (if you'll pardon the pun) is incredibly important, particularly in light of one US Supreme Court decision — Eldred v. Ashcroft.
Eldred v. Ashcroft told us (among other things) that everlasting copyright is a reality so long as there are media corporations eager to obtain it in a particular way. Retroactively increasing the term of copyright can be done every 20 years or so and by doing this one can achieve what would be unconstitutional to obtain outright – an everlasting term of copyright.
This matters for those who want to participate in a creative commons because it means we will need a way to use copyright law to ensure our ability to share with all those who want to share with us. By using a copylefted license we can do this and when we are as careful as the Free Software Foundation is in putting together licenses like the GNU GPL, we too can make our commons a legally defensible reality that should (unfortunately) last as long as copyright does.
I do not endorse the idea of a longer term of copyright. We, as a society, lose far more than we gain with everlasting copyright (for example, some works which are under corporate control will not be preserved if doing the work of preservation is not profitable). But so long as we have to suffer with the current overly long term of copyright, we might as well use copyright law to our mutual benefit.
Copyright 2004 J.B. Nicholson-Owens?
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
J.B. Nicholson-Owens? hosts "Digital Citizen" on WEFT 90.1 FM every other Wednesday from 8-10PM, consults using free software, and works at a Champaign, IL ISP which rebuilds computers for the poor.
Created by: stevphen last modification: Thursday 01 of July, 2004 [13:57:53 UTC] by stevphen
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