Critical essay: Stage 2

This is not my entire essay but I'm roughly halfway through and the other half I compiled my points and elaborated on them so you will have an idea of where I am heading with this. I still need to touch up some.


Copyright and copyleft are generally considered to be the polar opposites of each other and thus their true meanings and purposes are often misconstrued. Contrary to popular opinion, copyleft is not quite the exact opposite of copyright; in fact I may even be so bold as to venture the idea that copyleft may even include some aspects of copyright in its stance. Therefore, the success of the Copyleft/Free Culture movement does not necessarily mean an absolute return to a pre-copyright, or even pre-modern creative environment because they do not involve the outright absence of copyright altogether; rather, rather they both involve some surrendering of some but not all copyright laws, essentially by placing less emphasis on the mercenary aspects of copyright and more on the purpose of sharing ideas and improving them for the sake of creativity and advancement. A return to pre-modern/pre-copyright laws would mean the absence of copyright altogether.




The United States Copyright law, which will be the focal point of this discussion, was established in the 18th century with the intention to balance public interest with individual rights, in other words, the public’s rights to access knowledge should not be limited by the individual author’s right to restrict access. Another definition of copyright went further to include that copyright, among other species of intellectual property, enable creators to earn money from their works while generating new art, knowledge and information from the public, while at the same time offering protection to the original author. The conclusion we arrive at therefore, that encompasses these two explanations, is that copyright, although it offers protection to the author, was in essence aimed at fostering greater creativity and to ensure that the public has a greater variety of creative works available to use, learn from and consume and therefore facilitate the advancement and spread of knowledge. To quote the 18th Century language of the United States’ Constitution, the purpose of copyright was to “Promote the progress of Science”. In fact, the first United States copyright law was entitled “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning”. Copyright protects an author’s expression, but not his/her ideas.



Copyleft, on the other hand, is a form of licensing that uses existing copyright law to ensure a work remains freely available. The main difference between copyright and copyleft is that while copyright law can be used by an author to prohibit others from reproducing, adapting or distributing copies of his/her work, with copyleft, an author gives people the permission to reproduce, adapt or distribute his/her work under the condition that any resulting copies or adaptations are also free to be modified, that is, they are bound by the same licensing agreement. What people fail misunderstand about copyleft is that it is not a “free-for-all” circumstance. Copyleft does allow the author to impose some restrictions on his/her work. Indeed we can see that without existing copyright laws, copyleft would not in actuality, have grounds to exist.



Copyleft and copyright were both designed with the principal purpose of encouraging and developing ideas based on other’s ideas. The main difference is that copyright does not protect ideas, it merely protects the expression of the ideas, that is it protects the works themselves, while copyleft allows the works themselves to be modified and distributed with conditions.

• Copyleft fosters greater improvement because you already have a foundation to base your work off of while copyright, although it does foster creativity, makes it harder to improve anything because although the ideas would not be necessarily original, the works would have to be significantly.

• Without copyright there would be no copyleft because there would be no limitations already in place to ensure that uncooperative people would not take advantage of the freer software.

• Money talks – the biggest question remains that if money/recognition were not involved, would copyright even be necessary? And if copyright laws were not enforced, would there be copyleft/free culture? Copyright laws exist in copyleft because it ensures that self-interested people do not abuse the nature of the copyleft regime, but in fact make sure that it remains exactly as it is and fulfills the purpose for which it was created.

• Give examples of pre-modern/pre-copyleft days – Canterbury Tales/Bocaccio/Gower - Some of the tales in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are uncannily similar, almost exact replicates in some instances, to their source materials. Chaucer uses these sources to compile the Canterbury Tales, which is essentially a satire of English society of his day. According to modern copyright law, this would definitely be deemed illegal; however, because it was published pre-copyright, it is now widely accepted. This would not fall under Copyleft or Free Culture and so Copyleft/Free Culture cannot be considered the opposite of copyright.