"Copyleft"

[Fred Shapiro]

The term "copyleft" is not yet in the OED.  According to Wikipedia:

The term copyleft, according to some sources, came from a message
contained in Tiny BASIC, a freely distributed version of BASIC written by
Dr. Li-Chen Wang in the late 1970s. The program listing contained the
phrases "@COPYLEFT" and "ALL WRONGS RESERVED", puns on "copyright" and
"all rights reserved", a phrase commonly used in copyright statements.
Richard Stallman himself says the word comes from Don Hopkins, whom he
calls a very imaginative fellow, who mailed him a letter in 1984 or 1985
on which was written: "Copyleft--all rights reversed." The term
kopyleft with the notation "All Rites Reversed" was also in use in the
early 1970s within the Principia Discordia, which may have inspired
Hopkins or influenced other usage.

Fred Shapiro


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Fred R. Shapiro                             Editor
Associate Librarian for Collections and     YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS
   Access and Lecturer in Legal Research     Yale University Press,
Yale Law School                             forthcoming
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu               http://quotationdictionary.com
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