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Content Tagged with copyleft + copyright

An appeals court has erased most of the doubt around Open Source licensing, permanently, in a decision that was extremely favorable toward projects like GNU, Creative Commons, Wikipedia, and Linux. The man who prompted that decision could be described as the worst enemy a Free Software project could have. This is the story of how our community was able to benefit from that enemy.

or free software because it's difficult to compute the monetary value of software that is given away free of charge. As a result, many violations of copyleft licenses could have been punished with small fines that would amount to little more than a slap on the wrist. The decision outraged the free software community and the broader free culture movement. In December, a broad coalition of organizations that rely on copyleft licenses, including Creative Commons, the Software Freedom Law Center, and the Wikimedia Foundation, filed an amicus brief urging that the ruling be overturned. The brief, authored by lawyers at Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, pointed out that there are now hundreds of millions of works released under licenses similar to the Artistic License and suggested that the district court had failed to appreciate the potential conseque