Copyleft is a play on the word copyright and is the practice of using copyright law to remove restrictions on the distribution of copies and modified versions of a work for others and require that the same freedoms be preserved in modified versions.
Most commonly, copyleft is implemented by a license defining specific copyright terms applied to works such as computer software, documents, music, and art. Whereas copyright law, by default, automatically restricts the right to make and redistribute copies of an author's work, a copyleft license uses copyright law to ensure that every person who receives a copy of a work has the same rights to study, use, modify, and also redistribute both the work, and derived versions of the work as long as the same license terms apply to all redistributed versions of the work. Thus, in a non-legal sense, copyleft is the opposite of copyright.
In a legal sense, however, copyleft is based on the right of the author to impose copyright restrictions via a copyright license on those who want to use the work. Under a copyleft form of copyright license, the restrictions imposed are that the work cannot be copied, modified or used in any subsequent work unless the author of that subsequent work agrees to grant the same copyleft rights to the public to freely copy, use and modify the subsequent work. For this reason copyleft licenses are known as reciprocal licenses.
Authors and developers use copyleft to allow anyone to use, share and improve the work as a continuing process, disallowing people from sharing derived works with any new restrictions. For many people, copyleft is a technique which uses copyright as a means of subverting the restrictions traditionally imposed by copyright on the dissemination and development of knowledge. This approach uses copyleft primarily as a tool in a broadly scaled sniggling operation, whose aim is to permanently reverse such restrictions.
Copyleft relies on copyright law to undo the automatic prohibitions on copying and impose a perpetual, irrevocable, freedom to use the work. These permissions should be defined in a well drafted copyleft license. A widely used copyleft license is the GNU General Public License (GPL). Many fans of copyleft media believe that copyleft is a cross between copyright and public domain.
While copyleft is not a term in law, it is seen by proponents as a legal tool in a political and ideological debate over intellectual works. Some see copyleft as a first step in doing away with any kind of copyright law. In the public domain, the absence of copyleft-like protection leaves software in an unprotected state. Developers basing their work on public domain originals can spread and sell undocumented binaries without providing the source code. If legal copyright was abolished and no other rights were provided there would be no means for copyleft licenses to exist. The need for copyleft would be diminished in such an environment, as it would become lawful for the community to disassemble and disseminate proprietary software. However, there would be no way to preserve freedoms and rights for others or protect from propagations like software hoarding.
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