Talk:Commercial use of copyleft works

	This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:
Open (inactive) This article is within the scope of WikiProject Open, a project which is currently considered to be inactive.OpenWikipedia:WikiProject OpenTemplate:WikiProject OpenOpen articles

From the article:

Commercial exploitation of copyleft works differs from traditional commercial exploitation via Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). Exploitation of copylefted works include circumventing the license by gaining only knowledge of the work, or by a model of services--including consultancy and support--for a copylefted work. Generally, financial profit is expected to be much lower in a "copyleft" business than in a business using proprietary works. Firms with proprietary products can make money by exclusive sales, by single and transferable ownership, and lucrative litigation rights over the work.

This is blatantly non-NPOV. The article in general assumes a biased perspective, specifically that commercial use of copylefted works is bad. The article needs cleaning up or deleting. I don't have time this week, but if it's still bad next week I'll take a crack at it. RossPatterson 02:34, 21 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'd like to see this page improved instead of deleted. I have edited the part quoted above to help. Thanks, --Roger Chrisman 06:36, 11 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

My purpose in making the article was to move a bunch of cruft from copyleft which had no sign of being brought back to life, largely because of POV and reference problems. I was not attempting to make a POV fork. Improvements are much needed to this material. Thanks for taking a look into this, Ross. --Ashawley 04:37, 21 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

If this article is to be removed because as an essay it does not belong in an encyclopedia, please move it to http://Wikiversity before deleting it. Thank you, --Roger Chrisman 06:53, 11 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

"Generally, financial profit is expected to be much lower in a "copyleft" business than in a business using proprietary works"

I guess this sentence can be seen as outdated/invalid and removed now, with for instance Google Android smpartphones being the market leader in smpartphone sector (compare with Android_(operating_system)#Market_share) or "Red Hat [having] become the first open source company to achieve an annual turnover of more than $1 billion" [[1]].

Or at least this sentence should be updated, maybe saying that back then this was the case but that in many sectors this is increasingly not the case anymore today.

My experience with business management is practically zero, so please correct me if such a change were going too much in the opposite direction. --Tddt (talk) 14:17, 1 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

If free copies all over the place was not an issue for companies incomes, companies would not bother about piracy (which is to them, distribution of free copies). The main model is still the sale of a product, and when people want support, they typically don't pay for it and instead go from forum to forum to request for help at no charge. The comment is still valid nowadays. However, it would still requires an update: removing the “citation needed” annotation. --Hibou57 (talk) 21:23, 2 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Done. I added a reference to http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=420290&seqNum=3 which I picked from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software . --Hibou57 (talk) 17:15, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

This seems to be an interesting idea for "true" copyleft works (e.g. without a non-commercial clause) which might be noteworthy: http://questioncopyright.org/creator_endorsed

Unfortunately I do not know of many success stories for that other than Nina Paley's experiences with it, whether it really could be a viable model for commercial entities. --Tddt (talk) 14:30, 1 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I think this article can be greatly enhanced by adding more, positive examples for the commercial use of copyleft licensed works.

Some good ones have already been mentioned, like:

• Blender
• Red Hat
• Mandriva
• Street Performer Protocol

Here are some more platforms which allow getting a revenue from copyleft licensed works:

• Flattr - A micropayment/donation system
• VODO - A peer-to-peer, Creative Commons movie distributor
• Jamendo - Creative Commons music distributor, sells/relicenses music without CC/copyleft license restrictions to commercial entities
• Kickstarter (which utilizes the Street Performer Protocol)

The individual artists already mentioned in the text (Girl Talk and Nine Inch Nails) are nice but with the increasing number of successful examples, it doesn't seem feasible to keep on listing all those. Maybe a section for "pioneers" could be added? Where I'd list for example:

Movies:

• Bracey Smith and Josh Berhard with The Lionshare and Pioneer One (the latter having received nearly $100,000)
• Nina Paley with Sita Sings The Blues

Music:

• Nine Inch Nails with Ghosts I–IV and The Slip

Software:

• Ton Roosendaal with Blender
• Diaspora_(social_network)
• Red Hat
• Mandriva
• Canonical Ltd.
• Novell

(for Girl Talk I'm currently unable to find a source for his CC licensed music) --Tddt (talk) 15:33, 1 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

http://www.eff.org/share/compensation.php does not work anymore (and couldn't find a working one via quick googling). --Tddt (talk) 15:55, 1 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Is this article about how to make money from free software? Should it be renamed to "Free software business models"? Gronky (talk) 20:00, 21 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The title is incorrect; "copyleft works" are presumably works which are about copyleft, but "copylefted works" are works which are themselves copylefted. 185.217.158.63 (talk) 15:52, 27 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]