New Scientist Tries Out Copyleft

uchian writes: "New Scientist has an article about The GPL, open source, and how attempts are being made to apply the philosopy to areas other than software. Little new ground is covered, but it is interesting that the article itself is "Copyleft", so you are free to redistribute, modify and copy as long as long as your derivative work is also copyleft."

Comments

Open Company

[webword]

About 2 years ago I wrote The Open Company Manifesto. (Sorry for the self promotion, but it is related to this posting.)

Legal Protection

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you in force a copyleft program/item/idea/paper. Who's job is it, if the product produced is 2-3 generations or projects away from the original one? Is there any legal precedence on this?

greg@pd.net

Re:Legal Protection

[RazzleFrog]

They seem to define copyleft as "We have a copyright but we are waiving it so that it can be redistributed".

In their words - "We haven't given up our copyright on this article, but we have agreed to waive many of the exclusive rights a copyright normally bestows."

So if you abuse their copyleft notion then you will find out that they do still have a legal copyright.

I personally think that copyleft is silly. It should be copyfree but I guess that isn't as catchy as copyleft.

Re:Wow... News for nerds

[moonbender]

New Scientist is not "some dumbfuck magazine", it's a respected and well-founded source quoted and linked to regularily on Slashdot. It's not like articled on the GPL are abundant in the prominent non-IT press, especially not ones considering wider effects of copyleft.
Incidently, German c't (computer mag, as you might know) ran a similar, long article in one of their past issues, describing how the open source could affect other parts of the social and economic world.

CopyLEFT?

[Fesh]

Ok, I'll admit it's catchy. But how about copywrong? Or better yet, and more accurate, copyresponsibility?

Wrong, Wrong, Wrong!

[BlackGriffen]

"And so the experiment goes on. As a contribution to it, New Scientist has agreed to issue this article under a copyleft. That means you can copy it, redistribute it, reprint it in whole or in part, and generally play around with it as long as you, too, release your version under a copyleft and abide by the other terms and conditions in the licence."
I guess I'm nit-picking a bit, but there is a subtlety they missed in the article: you only have to release the modified code under copy left if you plan to release it. So if I were to, say, fix all of the problems with the 2.5 series Linux distros, I don't have to release the source code. If I release it, then it has to be copyleft, but the choice to release it is still mine.
I guess it would be pointless to modify an article and not redistribute it, but the phrasing above misrepresents copy-left.
BlackGriffen

Re:A Symbol to mark Open Content

[pmc]

The article in question does not have a symbol to mark it as Open Content or Copyleft or Free Content.

Apart from the backward © symbol in what must be about 144pt type. (This is in the paper edition).

I'd suggest ©++ for copyleft symbol. And this is not an entirely facetious suggestion either - the © is commonly available (and so are +) (unlike your "oc" symbol), and it clues up people that there is something over and above the usual copyright going on.

Couple of minor points..

[sid_vicious]

Though they talk about Stallman a lot, the article tends to blur 'free software' and 'open source'. I could see RMS forking this article.

And also, from the article: "[Linux source code] contributions are reviewed by a panel and the best ones are added to Linux." (emphasis mine)

Yeah, reviewed by a panel of one?