Word of the day: copyleft

I first came across the word 'copyleft' in a Computer Weekly article called The World of Wikinomics just over a year ago.

Here's the par in question:

Projects under that [WikiMedia Foundation] umbrella include Wikipedia (contributed to and edited by millions of people, and the fourth most visited website in the world) Wikibooks and Wikisource (out-of-copyright or "copyleft" texts) Wikimedia Commons (royalty-free multimedia files) Wikinews (which, like "microblogging" site Twitter, often breaks news globally), and Wikiversity (free-to-use courses and educational materials).

I'm not sure whether CW is saying here that Wikisource includes both out-of-copyright and copyleft texts, or whether it is saying that 'copyleft' means 'out of copyright'. I'm veering towards the latter.

So is copyleft a synonym for 'out of copyright'? Not according to Wikipedia:

Copyleft is a play on the word copyright to describe the practice of using copyright law to offer the right to distribute copies and modified versions of a work and requiring that the same rights be preserved in modified versions of the work.

Copyleft is a form of licensing and can be used to maintain copyright conditions for works such as computer software, documents, music and art.

Whatever its exact definition (if it has one), the word 'copyleft' originated in the 1970s and now has fairly widespread use: over seven million results in Google, although some of those are company names and so on. I'm surprised I only encountered it for the first time in 2009.

Oh, and just because I like it, here's a copyleft symbol:

Sir Tim Berners-Lee and me

I didn't blog yesterday evening because I was at the Science Museum here in London, listening to a talk by Sir Tim Berners-Lee - the inventor of the World Wide Web.

I've written about it for one of the Computer Weekly blogs, if you're interested:

Sir Tim Berners-Lee on the Web (past, present and future)

Investigative journalism, council jargon

A couple of things worth mentioning.

On Thursday I went along to a Q&A session with Computer Weekly's Tony Collins on investigative journalism. I was going to blog about it, but my colleague Adam Tinworth pipped me to the post. And if you look at the photo accompanying Adam's post, you can see me - just about - on the very far left. I know it doesn't look like it from the photo, but there were quite a lot of people at the Q&A.

Also during the week, Sarah drew my attention to a fun little BBC News Magazine quiz on council jargon. She managed 2/7; I managed 4/7.

Funnily enough, these two tie together nicely as Tony Collins has just written a piece for ComputerWeekly.com on the IT industry's reaction to the Local Government Association's 'jargon ban'.

Office jargon: go-live

A colleague recently received a work-related email that included the following sentence:

I’d love to get this up and running before the go-live

It seems that phrases such as 'go-live date' are being shortened to give a new noun, 'go-live'. Well, new to me at any rate.

I've even found a Computer Weekly article that uses 'go-live' (as a noun) in the headline: