Left is right, or something like that.....

Intellectual property rights are a daily issue for the public school teacher. Of the reading we did this week, the licensing scheme that intrigued me the most was copyleft.
Copyleft is a licensing scenario where the author or creator gives up some but not all rights under established copyright law. Rather than giving the work completely over to the public domain, where no ownership of copyright can be established, copyleft basically establishes some control over the actions of the secondary user of the product. Using copyleft, the work may be used as long as any products created are also licensed under the same copyleft scenario. The basic idea is no person or corporation can take your work and then modify it, and turn to traditional copyright to limit further use. It is really just a reciprocal licenses. Copyleft or reciprocal licenses are a way to make sure your work remains freely available in perpetuity, no matter who later uses it.
As an educator, this matters to me in a very real way. I understand people want to protect their intellectual property, but some of the things that education publishers copyright tie the hands of teachers. I hope I can create something that is so useful in the classroom that others want to use it, and I hope they will, and they will modify, improve, and then let others do the same. If I want to make money from it, that should come off my own time, teaching others how to use it, or writing about the product.
The story of how copyleft came to be exhibits the complexity of our current legal system of licensing intellectual property. Stories like this give me pause about the long term stability of open source licensing.
Below is a photo from the wikimedia commons which was released to the public domain.


See the information here. I would guess she just wanted to share a beautiful picture with the world.