Copyleft

Home / About / Copyleft

Content on this website

All information on this website (text and images) comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, and is released under the Design Science Licence unless otherwise stated. The right to copy is left with the user. Some pages are licensed under the GPL, or contain photos by other people who are credited as copyright holders. Please respect these rights. If you wish to use any materials from this website, it would be nice if you contact me first, but at the very least include a link to www.thesmith.org.uk - Cheers :-) Read on below for why I'm doing this...

Please note that you will regret hotlinking large images from this website - please copy them onto your own server or donate towards the cost of download traffic. Thanks!

A sane take on Intellectual Property

Ideas are free. There's no need to imprison them. Software patents, DRM, ~~Trusted~~Treacherous Computing: they all exploit you and your rights, and threaten users of Free Software such as Linux. There have been moves by large companies to extend intellectual property laws and establish patents on ideas. The 21st Century no longer needs these old ways and obsolete business models just dreamed up to make a quick buck at our expense.

Copyright law originated in an age of physical artforms, where objects such as books, photographs, and audio-cassettes were the mediums, and were not easily reproducible. Today, digital data is effortlessly manipulated by electronic means, with no need for physical form until required by humans; this data is not a limited resource as it can easily be cloned or modified.

Publishing is evolving to meet this changing world of Free Culture. Recently licences such as the Design Science Licence, Free Art Licence and Creative Commons Licences have been developed for publishing works other than software with freedom for users to copy and modify, so long as the attribution integrity of a work is preserved. This concept of freedom of information is known as copyleft and is currently paving the way for new schools of economic and sociopolitical theories. The future promises to be very interesting...