Copyleft

What is a Copyleft?

You’ve probably heard the term “copyleft” once or twice. It’s kind of a play on words, rather than official law that’s on the books somewhere. Copylefting is when the owner of a copyright actually uses copyright laws to remove all restrictions on the distribution and manipulation of an intellectual property. In effect, this makes it so that the artist’s exclusive rights become not-so-exclusive.

Copyright law usually allows an author to hold a monopoly on their own work, preventing others from reproducing, altering, or distributing copies of the work. A copyright licensing scheme, then, is a way for an artist to allow every single person with a copy of the work to do whatever they like with it, but only under the condition that those copies are also subject to the copyleft licensing arrangement. This is similar to the Creative Commons concept of “Share-alike”.

To equip a work with copyleft protection, the copyright holder ust codify the copying terms with a license. This license usually gives everyone possessing a copy with the same freedoms that the copyright holder has. These will usually include…

• The freedom to use the work
• The freedom to reproduce, share, and distribute the work freely
• The freedom to adapt or modify the work, and…
• The freedom to distribute modified or derivative copies of the work

However, the modified versions might not always fall under the same copyleft licensing scheme. Full copylefting is only made possible when the copyright holder also has it so that the license ensures that the author of a derivative work must release their derivative work under the same copylefting scheme as the original copylefted work.

Copylefting has come into vogue in recent years as a way for many artists to sort of give back to their fans. For example, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails distributed his last album online for free, encouraging his fans to make and distribute their own remixes. Likewise, the rapper Jay Z released a vocals-only version of his Black Album, also to encourage fan-made remixes. Incidentally, one of those remixes, The Gray Album, actually made a star of Jay Z fan DJ Dangermouse. Today, you probably know Dangermouse as one half of the eclectic hip hop/soul/rock and roll duo Gnarls Barkley. It’s interesting to note that DJ Dangermouse was actually threatened with legal action regarding his Gray Album. The title of the album comes from the fact that he mixed songs from the Beatles’ White Album with songs from Jay Z’s Black Album. The Black Album is free to remix and distribute, but the White Album is not. Therefore, even though the Gray Album was released for free on the internet, it did wind up constituting copyright infringement.

That’s something we should probably note: You can remix an open source or copylefted music album to your heart’s content, but once you start throwing in samples from copyright protected material that is not issued under a copyleft license, you may be liable for legal action from the owners of that copyrighted material (though not for the copyleft material).

Furthermore, you cannot take a copyleft protected album, remix it, and then sell it. If you’d like to say, put a copyleft song into a copyright protected movie, you’re probably just as liable, unless you have cleared this with the copyright holder ahead of time.

In other words, copyleft is free, as long as it remains free. For example, hip hop producer Timbaland recently got into a lot of trouble for sampling the copyleft protected song Acid Jazzed Nights, by open source “chiptune” musician Tempest. Tempest had released his original song with the intention of letting people listen to it and create derivative versions to their heart’s content, but Timbaland actually used his remixed version to produce the song Do It, which was released commercially. If Timbaland had released Do It for free, there would not have been a problem, but since money was changing hands, Timbaland basically breached the copyleft license which Acid Jazzed Nights was released under.

So a copyleft is basically free content, except that it is only free as long as it remains free. Public domain is different. The film Night of the Living Dead is in the public domain, and that means that anyone who wants to can burn DVDs of the film and sell them. If the film were released under copyleft license, the movie would be free to distribute, but illegal to sell.