copyleft - Page number 2

I recently graduated in May, and I had not heard of Creative Commons until I came to work at Red Hat. After a few months, I had gained some familiarity with Creative Commons but it was only when I was recently asked to create images for their 10th Anniversary that I realized I had some research to do.  » Read more

Open source software licenses and copyright law have a complex relationship. People often say that open source turns copyright on its head and loosely refer to open source licenses as "copyleft" licenses. Indeed, the idea of a license that grants perpetual rights to copy, modify, and distribute a work—and requires licensees to attach the same terms to any downstream work—certainly feels like the antithesis of copyright law's protectionist character. » Read more

Last week the Mozilla Foundation released version 2.0 of the Mozilla Public License. Immediately recognized as a free software license by the Free Software Foundation and approved as an Open Source license by the Open Source Initiative, MPL 2.0 is a well-crafted modern license that ought to be considered by any open source project desiring a weak copyleft licensing policy. » Read more

In part one of my Mozilla Public License piece, I mentioned license compatibility as a major feature of MPL 2.0. In fact, it's such a major - and complicated - issue that it warrants its own explanation. » Read more

Over the past 18 months, the Mozilla community has been revising the Mozilla Public License. See earlier post. We recently announced, in true community development fashion, a release candidate--the text that we hope will become MPL 2.0 after one last set of eyes review it. This piece is a brief backgrounder on what has changed in the new MPL, explaining why we're proud of this work and we hope you'll consider reviewing it - and maybe even using it for your next project. » Read more

The Open Source Hardware and Design Aliance (OHANDA) aims to do for hardware what the Creative Commons does for intellectual property and the GPL does for software: open it up. By applying open source principles to trademarks, OHANDA hopes to free devices from some restrictions imposed by patent law and foster "sustainable sharing of open hardware and design." » Read more

A few events took place that affirmed for me that pushing forward with the agenda to rid our room of copyright violations and plagiarism is the right course of action.
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Earlier this month, Creative Commons asked for comment on the new Public Domain Mark (PDM), "a tool that would make it easy for people to tag and find content already in the public domain."

The tag is meant to work alongside the CC0 public domain waiver. It's not meant as a license or legal instrument--merely as a label to help people find public domain works.
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I had the opportunity to sit down with Larry Lessig last week.  Co-founder of Creative Commons, law professor, author, and copyright guru, Lessig is a visionary of law and technology policy.

In the FLOSS community, Lessig is best known for his book Free Culture and work on copyright policy. In his view, attitudes towards copyright started to change when we saw kids and grandmothers sued for file sharing. Lessig has never argued for abolishment of copyright, but he has always argued that there needs to be balance―a more permissive society that allows artists to reserve the rights they need, while allowing others to remix and improve without fear of prosecution.

But two years ago, Lessig moved away from the copyright field to invest more time researching institutional corruption and citizen-funded elections. » Read more