Dear professionals As information/knowledge managers it become our duty to allow free flow of information. Any barrier to this will delay or even prevent the birth of new information, and probably result in the misuse of the existing one. In this context it is apt to think about adopting the "copyleft" rules and apply the same in the "context" of printed documents. I encourage you all to comment on this and express your views on "intellectual property right" What is copyleft? "Copyleft," in the popular usage of the term, means "a copyright notice that permits unrestricted redistribution and modification, provided that all copies and derivatives retain the same permissions." The idea of copyleft originated with uber-hacker Richard Stallman in 1983 when he started the GNU Project. In brief, his goal was "to develop a complete free Unix-like operating system." As part of that goal, he invented and wrote the GNU General Public License, a legal construct that included a copyright notice but added to it (or, technically, removed certain restrictions), so its terms allowed for the freedoms of reuse, modification and reproduction of a work or its derivatives to be kept for all. The idea is to have a free society where any license or copyright is unnecessary, and where anyone could share all published works for the common good with no sovereign-nation laws dictating who can say or use what in their expression or communication. For more information please visit Reference http://www.dsl.org/copyleft/ http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/nonsoftware-copyleft.html http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copyleft.html ___________________________________________________________________________ ******************************************************* * BENNY M.D. * * LIBRARIAN * * DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS * * INDIAN INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE * * BANGALORE-12., KARNATAKA, INDIA. * * PH:2932265 (EXTN.317) * * EMAIL: benny@math.iisc.ernet.in * * mdliles72@yahoo.com * *******************************************************