copyleft, license granting general permission to copy and reproduce intellectual property. Where copyright protects society’s interests in invention and creativity by providing individual incentives through copyright control, copyleft protects social interests in knowledge creation by vesting copyright control in a large general community. The concept of copyleft is central to many programming projects, and the license is most commonly used for software, digital art, writings, and other creative content.
Copyleft is a specific license granted under copyright law, and the international statutes governing copyright law are the mechanisms that establish and protect copyleft. Typically, copyleft is a general license agreement granted by a copyright owner permitting anyone to freely use copyrighted property but under specific terms. For example, copylefted software allows users to run, modify, copy, and distribute software on the condition that the source code remains open and publicly available. Such software must usually be passed on with a copyleft license that requires successive users to accept and transmit copyleft and mandates that any modifications or improvements to the copylefted software be likewise transmitted under copyleft.
Copyleft itself probably began in the work of MIT computer expert Richard Stallman. In 1983, Stallman started an open-source programming project called GNU (a reflexive acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix”) and created the first general public license to govern the use of GNU, keeping it and its derivatives open and freely available. Many consider the concept of copyleft to be a return to the earliest ideas of intellectual property, which treat ideas and their specific forms as a common heritage. Given that intellectual creations build on what has come before and shape what comes next, copyleft is seen as a bridging mechanism to encourage the growth of social knowledge and common good.