From Citizendium Copyleft describes the use of traditional copyright and intellectual property law to pursue goals of open sharing and collaboration. The term and its slogan (Copyleft: All rights reversed)) is a pun on "copyright", so the copy is left to the public to copy even more, as the rights are not reserved to the author, but reversed to the public.[1] Creative Commons and the open source movement present two examples of copyleft: both allow creators of work to attach 'copyleft' conditions on their work - this uses the protections of copyright law to ensure that the work is distributed freely. A key distinction for some copyleft work is whether the copyleft is 'viral' - in the case of the GNU General Public License and the Creative Commons ShareAlike licenses, all derivative work must also be licensed under the same license.
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