"Copyleft"

[Jonathan Lighter]

"All Wrongs Reversed" is what we need.

  JL

Fred Shapiro <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Fred Shapiro
Subject: "Copyleft"
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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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