🌑 Mon, Sep 12th, 2022

On Copyleft and why I use GPLv3

This is a short outline on guaranteeing creative freedom to users of your works through copyleft. Licensing of creative works is an extremely tiresome topic so I keep all my opinions on intellectual property law contained to this page.

You can use the term “software” in place of “creative works” and it should have the same gist.

I release my creative works under a strong copyleft license with an attribution and sharealike requirement for several reasons—

I want future users of my work (and derivative versions thereof) to be afforded the same creative freedoms I granted them when they first took delivery of my work, no matter the context.

In the most general sense, these creative freedoms include, for any purpose—
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 share derivative versions with others.
This includes commercial works derived in whole or in part from copylefted works. Users of that work must be afforded the same freedoms enjoyed by the author of that derivative work.
Attribution becomes less important as the original work becomes unrecognizable through multiple iterations of changes, but omitting attribution altogether makes spreading awareness of your creative freedoms granted by the copyleft license far more difficult, which is why it is a requirement.
In an ideal world, intellectual property law would not exist and neither would the need for copyleft licenses that use copyright law to enforce their terms, this is the next best thing. ^{(Yes, I hate it too.)}

On permissive licenses and the public domain

Oftentimes, creators (usually programmers), will take the ideological “pushover” approach by licensing their work under a more permissive license—a license which releases all practical copyright interest in their creative works, usually with one or two token restrictions such as requiring attribution.

The reasons for doing this are many, but most can be summarized as:

“All my online friends are doing it.”
“Copyleft licenses are literally communism, I don’t know what words mean, I am a huge idiot.” 🥴
“I don’t care about legal mumbo-jumbo, I just want to code.”
“I only write open source software to secure a tech industry job.”

The last one almost invariably comes bundled with:

“I have an irrational, utter fear of commercial interests overlooking or avoiding my copylefted work in favor of someone else’s permissive licensed work.”

It’s not difficult to see why. Permissive licenses that require only attribution are as good as public domain when derivative versions of your work can be re-licensed and made proprietary, a normal copyrighted work with all rights reserved, making it legally unavailable for you to study, share and modify freely.

As it stands, you can take anything from the ~~public~~ permissive domain, and not be required to contribute the resultant derivative work back into the same ~~public~~ permissive domain for others to use and benefit from, like you did initially. Re-licensing permissive works allows you to subscribe to the “fuck you, got mine™” school of creative freedom—the legal equivalent of pulling up the ladder up behind you.

By far, the most prominent and egregious example is The Walt Disney Company, who, throughout the 20th century, made billions through the plundering and retelling of public domain stories and characters. Then they paid it forward by successfully lobbying to extend US copyright protections through the Sonny Bono Act of 1998, pushing enforceable copyright terms well past the practical limits of human lifespan¹, all so no one in this century or the next could ever do the same with Disney’s own cultural works.

Copyleft licenses give you the legal framework to prevent this from happening to you or any future users of your works.

When you remove all legal barriers for re-licensing of creative works, people will do so, and some might feel so emboldened they won’t even attribute you.

So long as intellectual property law continues to exist in its current form, copyleft licenses are the key to guaranteeing creative freedoms to users of your work, no matter how trivial. You should reject permissive licenses in all their forms, and spit on all their advocates!

“But what if I want to make money off my work?”

Copyleft does not preclude the possibility of financial gain from your works, but if your particular category of creative work makes monetization difficult or untenable, there is no legal roadblock stopping you from dual-licensing your works.

Dual-licensing, or multi-licensing, is releasing your works under a copyleft license to the general public while offering entities not willing to abide by the terms of the copyleft license a unique, yet legally binding licensing agreement to use your copyrighted work as they wish in exchange for royalties, money, gainful employment, whatever you want.

Your copyright is still legally yours, some rights reserved, and will continue to be for the rest of your life plus 70 years. A copyleft license only give selected rights to the general public, with the expectations that those rights stay intact for all future users. In effect, you can “sell out” without truly selling out your or your user’s creative freedoms.

As it turned out, extending copyright terms to “forever” wasn’t considered constitutional, and “forever minus one day” would be legally difficult to define, so they settled for 120 years for corporate authorship.

— October 7, 1998, Congressional Record Vol. 144, No. 139, pp. H9952 ↩