The Silent Number

Posted: 2009-08-24

Not too long ago, i was using the Character Map application in Ubuntu to search for a Copyleft symbol in Unicode. I was quite surprised to find that there was none. The next obvious step was to Google it. The only relevant information i could find was discussion nearly a decade old on the Unicode mailing list. Two threads from May, 2000 discussed the idea, but as it would appear, never went anywhere. There was some confusing debate which, once everything else was filtered out, boiled down to two main points. Firstly, that the Copyleft symbol might be encumbered, and it would need to be proven that the mark is not a trademark, registered trademark, sales mark, or a copyrighted design. I don't even need to respond to that, just admire the copy i've got here from Wikipedia in the public domain. Secondly, there wasn't enough to show how widespread its use was. It may have been debatable back then, but now Copyleft has spread to popular software, music, video, books, and content of all sorts. Really, how has this not come up again in the last ten years? Can somebody please help write up and submit a proposal for this?