Bill Hooker at Open Reading Frame has a blog post on what’s wrong with copyleft. Hooker argues that copyleft is detrimental to future remix, especially when mixing multiple works. From the blog post:
Although copyleft and NC clauses achieve their own immediate goals, widespread license incompatibility1 means that they often (perhaps usually) defeat part of the larger purpose of Open licensing. The use case where this is most prominent is remix2, since reuse and redistribution of individual copylefted or NC-licensed works or their derivatives is usually just a matter of retaining the original license. But multiple works can only be recombined into new works if their respective licenses are compatible — otherwise, there’s no licensing option for the remix that doesn’t violate the licensing terms of at least one of the ingredients. Not only that, but if any of the works in the mix carries a copyleft license, that license takes over the entire remix and everything downstream of it, thus propagating the incompatibility problem.
Thanks to Peter Suber at Open Access News.
