Why is Copyleft important, or even necessary?
Certain restrictions of copyright — such as distribution and modification — are not very useful to “cyberia,” the “free, apolitical, democratic community” that constitutes the internetworked digital world. With computers, perfect copies of a digital work can easily be made — and even modified, or further distributed — by others, with no loss of the original work. As individuals interact in cyberia, sharing information — then reacting and building upon it — is not only natural, but this is the only way for individual beings to thrive in a community. In essence, the idea of copyleft is basic to the natural propagation of digital information among humans in a society. This is why the regular notion of copyright does not make sense in the context of cyberia. Simple ‘public domain’ publication will not work, because some will try to abuse this for profit by depriving others of freedom; as long as we live in a world with a legal system where legal abstractions such as copyright are necessary
