Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A form of licensing that encourages the distribution of software at no charge for noncommercial uses.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The philosophy of using copyrights to enforce freedom of information, especially software source code.
  • noun A software license that follows this philosophy.
  • verb To license under a copyleft license.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[After copyright.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Pun on copyright.

Support

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Examples

  • The Copyleft Foundation, which initiates its course this coming month of October year 2006, issues a formal invitation to participate to all those interested in copyleft and who form a part of the chain of assessment of the arts, culture an science as well as individuals and associative companies.

    Boing Boing 2006

  • The GPL is called a copyleft license, which is wordplay on copyright.

    Linux Today 2008

  • A concept in competition with the idea of copyleft is the "non-commercial" license, which attempts to restrict the use of a work for "commercial" purposes.

    LXer Linux News 2008

  • The GPL is called a copyleft license, which is wordplay on copyright.

    Linux Today 2008

  • The GPL is called a copyleft license, which is wordplay on copyright.

    Linux Today 2008

  • "copyleft" - software licenses that not only allow copying, but require it.

    Netvouz - new bookmarks taxpayer 2009

  • "copyleft" - software licenses that not only allow copying, but require it.

    Netvouz - new bookmarks 2009

  • "copyleft" - software licenses that not only allow copying, but require it.

    Netvouz - new bookmarks 2009

  • It is radical because previous attempts have tried to build on the evident success of the GNU GPL by taking a kind of copyleft approach: using copyright to limit copyright.

    Open Access Data - A Question of Protocol glyn moody 2007

  • Do you own the copyright, and if so would you be willing to give a general "copyleft" or other no-royalty license?

    Constitutional curiosities: a 21-question scavenger hunt 2006

  • “Copyleft” means that the license allows for the free distribution, use, and modification of copyrighted material (in this case software), with the stipulation that those same rights extend to all derivative works; that means that any project built using GPL code must itself have a GPL license.

    AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source Ben Thompson 2019

Comments

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  • Often used to describe the GPL, the GNU Public License.

    January 8, 2008

  • Does the copyleft symbol exist as a font? Is there any right-left equivalent of the upside-down tool whichbe linked to on upside-down?

    May 11, 2009

  • Can you see a reversed c here? → Ↄ

    I got it from here, but I can't view it on my machine.

    There's been some discussion about the possibility of adding the symbol here.

    May 11, 2009

  • I can't see it.

    May 15, 2009

  • Me neither

    May 15, 2009

  • How about ?

    May 15, 2009

  • I can see both of them here from a different computer, same Firefox, but using Linux this time.

    May 15, 2009

  • I can also see them both now

    May 15, 2009