In the world of free culture licences, copyleft describes licences that require derivative works to be distributed under the same licence (or, sometimes, a similar one that guarantees the same freedoms to the public).
But I noticed that, at least in the case of free software licences, copyleft licences tend to be longer and more complicated than some of the wonderfully brief so-called permissive licences. For example, the ISC licence consists of a copyright notice, a 34-word permission notice, and a 76-word disclaimer of warranties and liabilities (if I’ve counted correctly).
For comparison, I asked on a relevant mailing list several weeks ago what the shortest copyleft licence anyone knew of was. Continue reading A non-coercive copyleft licence