Copyright vs Copyleft —What|Why|How
You must have heard about Copyright License and you might also know that it is used to grant the creator the exclusive rights of use and distribution of his/her original work. Copyrights are everywhere around us. But there’s a thing called Copyleft too.
In this article, you are first going to learn about Copyright, Public Domain and then we’ll talk about Copyleft.
Copyright License
When the printing press was first invented by Johannes Gutenberg, the speed of printing was slow and it was difficult to create copies of books, documents, etc. However as the printing presses started getting faster, more amount of content was available to be consumed.
This gave people the ability to copy and reproduce large amounts, with no control over who did them. Therefore the British came up with the Copyright License.
In simple words, Copyright is a right granted to the author of the original work, including the rights to authorize or ban the publication, distribution of their work. They protect the authors from unauthorized copying or selling of their work.
Copyrights are granted for a limited amount of time after which the work will enter the public domain.
The Public Domain
The Public Domain consists of all the creative works to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. The copyrights are generally valid until 50 to 100 years after the author’s death.
Simply put, anyone can use, modify and sell these creative works without the permissions of the author.
Beethoven’s compositions are a good example of things going into Public Domain. Music works have copyrights of 70 years after author’s death. Therefore 70 years after death of Beethoven in 1827, his music compositions are available for everyone to use and sell.
Walt Disney’s copyright of the Mickey Mouse and other characters was set to expire in 1998. Those were the major source of income and the only major brand identity of Disney. Disney was the major leader and effectively lobbied the entertainment industry to push for an extension of 20 years, thus Mickey Mouse is going to enter into a Public Domain in 2024.
Disney can still prevent other companies from using Mickey’s image if it is able to prove that Mickey Mouse has evolved from just a character to its Brand Identity. They can register it as a trademark if they are able to prove this successfully.
Trademarks are more powerful than copyrights because they are permanent and represent a brand identity. On the other hand, Copyrights are temporary and are just applicable for an artwork.
Copyleft
A Copyleft license is a modification of the word copyright. Under a Copyleft license, anyone can modify and distribute the work. This requires just one condition to be met : The same freedom must be preserved in the modified versions of the original work.
People can use, modify and distribute the work as they want. This encourages better and more publications. However, the Copyleft obliges that the modified work must be distributed on the base of the same (or similar) Copyleft license. However, it is not necessary that copylefted content be made free like the work in public domain.
The GNU General Public License, originally written by Richard Stallman, was the first Copyleft license to see extensive use, and continues to dominate the licensing of copylefted software.
To summarize, Copyleft License grants the people :
1. the freedom to use the work,
2. the freedom to study the work,
3. the freedom to copy and share the work with others,
4. the freedom to modify the work, and the freedom to distribute modified and therefore derivative works.
However, to make a work perfectly Copyleft, the license has to ensure that the author of a derived work can only distribute such works under the same or equivalent license.
Copyright vs Copyleft
In general, copyright law is used by an author to prohibit recipients from reproducing, adapting, or distributing copies of their work. However, obtaining a copyright license is not that easy and it is difficult to keep a track of copyright infringements. Therefore people prefer Copyleft License.
In contrast to Copyright, under Copyleft, an author may give every person who receives a copy of the work permission to reproduce, adapt, or distribute it, with the accompanying requirement that any resulting copies or adaptations are also bound by the same licensing agreement.
Instead of letting the work fall into the Public Domain, Copyleft grants some rights to the author to keep a control on the work and its distributions.
Copyright is based on the philosophy of restriction and originality of work of an author, on the other hand, Copyleft not only represents freedom but also requires freedom.
I hope you gained a better insight into the Copyright and Copyleft. I would love to hear about your inputs in this discussion, please do comment.
This is the first article under my new What-Why-How Series where I will be going through features, technologies and topics. I’ll be talking about what they are, why are they useful and how to use them. Keep a check for more articles. Thank You for reading.
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