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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • RE: Copyleft

    The idea of copyleft is that you give anyone the freedom to do anything with your work, with one essential restriction: they do the same for their changes, derivative works etc. Technically attribution doesn’t have to be part of a copyleft licence, but all copyleft licences I know have a requirement to preserve copyright info.

    And yes, it is popular in software (GPL, MPL, EPL), but for other types of works there is CC BY-SA 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike). If you want to copyleft books, images, videos, other forms of text… this is the way to go, IMO.

    Some additional remarks, just to clarify:

    • Copyleft is not “giving up all copyright” - copyleft essentially “plays” the copyright system in a way that makes sure nobody is restricting access to or usage of one’s work. Using the rules of copyright against copyright, if you will.
    • In some jurisdictions, there is no such thing as “giving up all copyright” or “dedicating something to the public domain”. Best you can do, generally, is giving users all the same/relevant rights.
    • Most Creative Commons licences are not copyleft, only the ones with a ShareAlike (SA) clause. Some CC licences are also nonfree, meaning they don’t give you all the freedoms to do what you want with the work. The 2 possible nonfree clauses in CC licences are ND (no derivative works) and NC (no commercial use). NC can also be used together with a SA clause, making CC BY-SA (free) and CC BY-NC-SA (nonfree) the two CC copyleft licences.