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?
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8 comments:
©
That's copyright... sigh.
I've added an external link to the wikipedia page on copyleft (hoping to draw some people here to raise a bit of awareness) and will look into writing a proposal. Would any readers here please provide us with usage examples? Increase in usage seems to be the major point we've got to prove, at least as far as the unicode mailing list is concerned,
-1 on that. Write under what license it is and add a proper copyright information. In many countries there is no such thing as public domain because you cannot remove the copyright from any work.
@mitsuhiko: Even in those countries, anything for which the copyright has expired is in the public domain. Thus, for example, the works of Shakespeare are (and always have been) in the public domain absolutely everywhere.
What I would also love is a ‘no copyright’ symbol. The best one can currently do is to combine characters in a horribly non-semantic manner and hope the result displays correctly. I will let this comment stand as a simple example.
©̸ David
have you tried to address the problem with unicode?
Danny, you whine a lot. I bet you feel entitled to a copyleft symbol. — Ɔ⃝ 2009 Robert Johnson
Of course I have been aware of this for a long time. Have you samples of the character in use? Its presence on the, erm, copyright page of a book would be nice.
The copyleft sign has no legal status, though the copyright symbol does. This doesn't mean that as a character in use the copyleft sign shouldn't be encoded. But a proper case has to be made. Robert Johnson's example above is one attestation of it in use. But for the character to get encoded we would need to see it in use in "real" contexts. The copyright page of a printed book would be good (that's how we got the archival paper sign in). and its use on an internet site where it was not an example (as Robert's is above) would be good. The more the better.
Once you've done that we can proceed with a proposal.
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