100 Ideas that Changed the Web

Copyleft

IDEA N^o 64

CREATIVE COMMONS

Folk hero Woody Guthrie wrote in the 1940s: ‘This song is copyrighted in US for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin’ it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.’

While not all rights owners are quite as generous, there are varying degrees to which people wish to protect their work. Intellectual property laws are usually black and white – you either retain or relinquish copyright. Motivated by the introduction of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, Eric Eldred, Lawrence Lessig and Hal Abelson decided that there must be a middle way.

Eldred, ...