| abstract | - Copyleft is a play on the word copyright to describe the practice of using copyright law to remove restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions of a work for others and requiring that the same freedoms be preserved in modified versions. It should be noted that Sikhism is a path of love and sacrifice and all Sikhs have a duty to promote the principles of Sikhi. In this regards, many Sikhs both present and past have offered huge amounts of their work for "free distribution" for educational purposes and the free promotion of Sikhism. In keeping with this principle established by our Gurus, work used on this site is influenced by this opinion and precedence. Copyleft is a form of licensing and can be used to modify copyrights for works such as computer software, documents, music and art. In general, copyright law allows an author to prohibit others from reproducing, adapting, or distributing copies of the author's work. In contrast, an author may, through a copyleft licensing scheme, give every person who receives a copy of a work permission to reproduce, adapt or distribute the work as long as any resulting copies or adaptations are also bound by the same copyleft licensing scheme. A widely used and originating copyleft license is the GNU General Public License . Similar licenses are available through Creative Commons —called Share-alike . Copyleft can also be characterized as a copyright licensing scheme in which an author surrenders some but not all rights under copyright law. Instead of allowing a work to fall completely into the public domain (where no copyright restrictions are imposed), copyleft allows an author to impose some, but not all, copyright restrictions on those who want to engage in activities that would otherwise be considered copyright infringement. Under copyleft, copyright infringement can be avoided if the would-be infringer perpetuates the same copyleft scheme. For this reason copyleft licenses are also known as "reciprocal" licenses. While copyright law protects the rights of the creator by providing control of distribution and modification, the idea of copyleft is to grant subjective libre freedom to end users. Copyleft licenses specify clauses which explicitly remove those restrictions the creator considers to not provide libre freedom to the end user. In software, open source and ((w|free software copyleft licenses place the primary restriction that information helpful in supporting modification of software (e.g. source code) must be made available to a user with a copy of the licensed software and allows the original author to be acknowledged.
|
