Copyright vs Copyleft

Copyright VS. CopyleftArlet Rua Roxana Arroyo

What is Copyright?• This is the most popular license, and

unfortunately it's the most used one. It allows full rights to the owner of the work (that may not be the very author), and he's the only one that may decide what to do with it, whether to charge for it or not, besides having to request permission for usage. Distribution is only restricted to the owner of the creation, that means the license only allows possession but not distribution. This is usually applied to books, music, movies and software, as an example.

What is CopyleftThis license and Creative Commons license are pretty the same, this is because copyleft is the mother license for Creative Commons. This is quite the opposite of Copyright. Works are not restricted by any constraint: they can be modified, shared with other users and content can be copied. Modification of original work may even be commercial.

Difference betweenCopyright & Copyleft

Copyright gives the owner an exclusive right to reproduce, reuse or

republish the copyright material.

A school of thought known as the open source movement which

seeks to override copyright and allow the copyright owner to license his or her works. This

form of licensing is known as Copyleft and is commonly

used in relation to software and open source code.

This license is son of Copyleft and is gaining more and more notoriety

firstly because of blogs. Difference between these licenses is that

Creative Commons is more flexible than its father: level of protection can

be set directly by the author of the work. There are different possibilities to establish what kind of constraints to attribute to a Creative Commons License, but all of them share one, that is acknowledging the author of

the work. This is default obligation for the user. All other constraints are

specified by the author.

WikipediaHow does it work?

Wikipedia• Wikipedia, as the name suggests, uses a

"wiki" system to build out its encyclopedia. What exactly is a wiki? The online dictionary Webopedia defines a wiki as "a collaborative Web site the perpetual collective work of many authors. A wiki allows anyone to edit, delete or modify content that has been placed on the Web site including the work of previous authors." Since Wikipedia is open to the public, anyone with an Internet connection is free to anonymously contribute to the online encyclopedia by either adding a new article or editing a previous author's work.

How it works?• Wikipedia is largely controlled by a

limited number of administrators who have the power to purge articles and ban editors. Like editors, these administrators remain anonymous and do not have to prove any expertise to establish their authority. 

• The first wiki Web site was created in 1995 by Ward Cunningham to promote a freer exchange of information between computer programmers. He got the word “wiki” from the Hawaiian word for “quick” and called his Web site “WikiWikiWeb.”

• Wikipedia itself warns readers that "We do not expect you to trust us. Some articles are of the highest quality but others are admittedly complete rubbish.

• Although Wikipedia is the most well known wiki Web site, it is hardly the only one.

• The corporate world has taken note of the usefulness of wiki technology and has begun to incorporate it internally. Companies ranging from Nokia to IBM have set up their own internal wikis to make information flow more efficiently.

• Wikipedia is a nonprofit that does not accept advertising and relies on donations to stay alive.