Copyrights are intended to protect the creator. But what if you want to give use to individuals and groups without giving up rights totally? The burgeoning “Copyleft” movement suggests a controversial answer.

Copyright or…Copyleft?

To perhaps overstate the obvious, creative work such as done by artists and designers of all kinds bring into existence things which didn’t exist before (or, if one accepts the dictum that there is nothing new under the sun, things that didn’t at least exist in the created form).

It’s necessary to state that fact because, in most economic systems, creatives create for (it is to be hoped) payment. And, in most of today’s economic climate, payment tends to go to the owner. And, when the product is essentially from the mind of a creator, the essence of that property is intellectual. Therefore, we have the concept of copyright, the basics of which is that, under law, the creator of a design or artwork has the enforcable legal right to derive economic benefit – income – from the products of their work, and moreover, that the creator has the sole right to say who and how their work product is disseminated and profited by.

“You” as the creative agent, should have the right to make a living off “your” ideas and concepts, and anyone who wants to use your work should pay you for your toil.

In recent years, given the spread of digital technology across the very face of the planet, we have been provided with an embarrassment of riches in exposure to ideas, concepts, and design. Concurrent with this seems to be a realization that sharing is also a good thing, but releasing rights to the public usually meant giving up one’s rights to profit exclusively as well. Perhaps as a side-effect to this, alternative methods of defining intellectual property rights have begun to emerge. Latterly, and somewhat in a mirror of the traditional copyright (with its roots in print), these have been referred to under the rubric “copyleft”.

Free in the sense of Freedom

In the broadest sense, copyleft is the process of making a work (program, design, artwork, et. al.) free – if not in price, then in the sense of “freedom”, to extend the right to change and redistribute a work, and requiring that all modified or extended derivatives be free in this way as well. This is in contradistinction to public domain – where a work is released to the world without restrictions or obligations on its use of any sort.

The GNU (Free Software Foundation) Logo (courtesy www.gnu.org)

The ultimate roots of copyleft seem to be evident in the software world. Like graphic design creatives, programmers create works based on their intellectual effort. In the mid-1970s, a project – the GNU project – was begun by Richard Stallman. [1] Today we call this the Free Software Foundation. Driven by a strong social conscience, GNU endeavored to deliver software power to the people by the initial route of a free Unix™-compatible operating system called GNU (GNU’s Not Unix).

The innovation of interest here is not just that of a free operating system driven by passion and ethical principles but the requirement that those who develop and extend the software in turn offer it for free, and anyone refining those refinements offer that product in turn for free, and so on. As pointed out, this is different from public domain, which has no restrictions, obligations, or requirements.

This line of evolution has its modern presence in the form of the [2] GNU General Public License (GPL). This document not only embodies the concepts mentioned, but aims to prevent any licensee from making any such-licensed software into proprietary software at a later date. If it was created to be open, available, and free (intellectually if not by price), then it must remain as such as long as it is used.

Copyleft in the Arts and Design

By now the question must be begged: while software developers and creatives are, in a view similar, how does an alternative system of software licensing bear on creative copyright?

Looked at in general terms, rights under software licenses – copying, distribution, usage – are not all that much different from author’s rights under traditional copyrights. The concepts transfer well enough, as a matter of fact, that there is a variation of the GPL for documents.

The [3] GNU Free Documentation License (FDL) does the same thing for published work that the GPL does for software. From the FDL’s Preamble section:

“The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other functional and useful document “free” in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially. Secondarily, this License preserves for the author and publisher a way to get credit for their work, while not being considered responsible for modifications made by others.”

The FDL is recommended, as the FSF says, for works whose purpose is instruction or reference, that is, textbooks and the like, and was originally conceived to encourage the production of manuals for free software. But, looked at another way, printed material is printed material, and the aim of the FDL suggests usage beyond mere textbooks and manuals.

Welcome to the Commons

In current times the concept of “commons” has gained currency. To most people, this would seem to be an idea that some facets of culture and art are so much a part of our shared cultural fabric that it would be unseemly for one party or another to assert exclusive rights to exhibit and profit from their existences.

The Creative Commons “Some rights reserved” banner” (courtesy Creative Commons)

An example would be a popular publicly-displayed statue by a well known-artist. Being a work of art, the creator would presumably have rights to do derivative works and economically profit from representations of it on mugs, t-shirts, and postcards, and to prevent others from making money on their work in the same way. However, the artist has no legal power to prevent others from taking snapshots of it for personal enjoyment, nor would the artist be entitled to payment if another artist, for example, makes an oil painting of the scene in which the object is not to promote the statue but rather to use it as simply a part of the scene. This could be seen as a middle ground between copyrights and absolute copyleft.

This is seen by some as a demonstration of the limitations and flaws of traditional copyrights. A notable activity attempting to draw this line to the benefit of all is [4] Creative Commons.

Creative Commons endeavors to enable various levels of creator’s rights, and also functions as a rights-management group as well as an informational site. The site offers a variety of licenses in disciplines appropriate to design, print, video, music, and art, and there are myriad versions of the Creative Commons licenses available.

Creative Commons “Share and Share Alike” mark (Courtesy Creative Commons

The aim is to give creatives a way to allow specified uses of the property without giving up all rights. They allow combinations of Attribution permission, commercial/non commercial use, say yes or no to derivation, or GPL-style sharing. The CC site determines which style of license is best for the individual by means of a short online questionnaire, and the end product is a “Commons Deed” (a plain-language version of the license), the legal fine-print that is designed to back the creator in court, and digital code for appropriate installation on websites and enabling locations as CC content by search engines

The key to indentifying CC-licensed content is the “Some Rights Reserved” icon, which is being displayed in such diverse locations as Wikipedia, the definitive Star Trek fan wiki “Memory Alpha”, the Groklaw website, the works of SF writer Cory Doctorow, and the podcast This Week in Tech.

CC also can help the creator register and administer Sampling licenses for music, GNU GPL and LGPL (Limted GPL) and Public Domain. There’s also a “Founder’s Copyright” license offered, which is a 14-year copyright extendable to 28 years, which is what the creators feel is closest to what the American founding fathers meant when they thought of copyright.

Creative Commons has an impressive concept and site, but it must be noted that the group itself is a voluntary plan and does not replace copyright law. In this way, it is as much of an extension of principle-based changes as the GPL is.

The Flip Side of the Coin

The scheme in general seems logical and well-thought out but coming, as it does, alongside an established scheme that some feel already works well enough is destined to generate reaction, raising points that must be considered.

Brad Holland, in an article written last year for AIGA, [5] “The Copy Left is not Right”, holds that the Copyleft movement can actually mean damage to the freelance professional. What he seems to be saying is, by seeking to fundamentally change copyright law, reforms can rain on the just and the unjust alike, while preventing corporations from getting the intellectual property “lock” on ideas, it will just as much impose burdens upon the individual creative, with the potential to actually stifle creative activity.

Particularly cited is the thinking of Copyleft intellectual light Lawrence Lessig, author of Free Culture: How Big Business Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (The Penguin Press, 2004), who is credited with, as described, a system of of copyright limited to five years, with priced renewal options, the end result seeming to be a torrent of paperwork so overwhelming that creators would mostly give up under the load, allowing intellectual property to “fall through the cracks”, as it were.

Holland makes a good point here. The intellectual forces behind any movement tends inform the movement itself, and even if Lessig’s proposal doesn’t seem evident in the actvities of such organizations as Creative Commons, it seems reasonable to assume that such rationales may make themselves known over the course of time. If, indeed, one accepts the concept of copyright being necessary to protect the economic position of creatives (for, after all, if anyone can help themselves to creative output without having to pay for the honest work of a creative, where will the income come from?), which is a position that seems reasonable in our capitalistic system of having to make a living, then the existence of such a school of thought may be a legitimate cause for concern.

The Discussion May Be Just Beginning

With the proliferation of digital technology in today’s world, the flow of ideas, concepts, and content across the globe has gone, in little more than a generation, from a gentle flow to an intense torrent. Indeed, wherever someone has a computer, a USB port, and a Flash drive, there’s a potential for immense unauthorized borrowing.

Out of the need to have some reasonable control over our work products, but also to enable appropriate sharing throughout our global village, new ways of looking at intellectual property rights are emerging. There is a brisk debate going on, and indications are that it will take a while yet to work out.

Creatives all over the wired world have to be more aware than ever of the emerging potential of Copyleft to change the copyright landscape, and what rights they have available to them under copyright law. Forewarned is forearmed, the old saw has, and while keeping an eye on the changing digital copyright landscape may be no mean feat, it looks to be something that the modern creative has to be informed on, as a matter of self-defense.