Copyleft Licensing: Freedom That Comes With A Comprehensive Copyrighted Manual
- IJLLR Journal
- 8 minutes ago
- 1 min read
Swati Agrawal, Amity Law School, Amity University Madhya Pradesh, India
Archi Jain, Amity Law School, Amity University Madhya Pradesh, India
ABSTRACT
Imagine living in a world where the principle of "sharing is caring" is taken so literally that it's codified into law. Welcome to the realm of copyleft! In an era where corporations heavily guard their intellectual property, copyleft swoops in as the counterforce of the digital age, redistributing the rights from the resourceful to the broader public. This socialistic concept under the copyright law picked up momentum after personalities such as Richard Stallman advocated for the precedence of community collaboration rather than commercialisation of source codes and the like.
While non-proprietary licensing sounds all utopian and undemanding, au contraire, there exist some interesting legal quandaries and contractual obligations that require serious consideration. Not to mention the jurisdictional issues given the very nature of copyleft being the enabler of boundary-forgoing development. What this paper thus aims for, is to accent the parallels that exist in the ideologies of both, copyright and copyleft, and further delve into the peculiar and somewhat paradoxical world of copyleft- where the freedom to copy and modify comes with specific conditions and altruism is mandated by law.
