Re: Copyleft Symbol

From: Mark Davis ⌛ (mark@macchiato.com)
Date: Fri Aug 21 2009 - 11:20:25 CDT

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    At the time this was talked about, there didn't appear to be a lot of usage
    as I recall. If there is now, you can file a proposal as outlined on
    http://www.unicode.org/pending/proposals.html

    Mark

    On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 07:20, Danny Piccirillo
    <danny.piccirillo@gmail.com>wrote:

    > I recently went looking for a Unicode Copyleft symbol and was surprised to
    > find that one did not already exist. Upon Googling the matter, i found
    > these<http://unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/Archives-Old/UML022/1223.html>
    > two<http://unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/Archives-Old/UML022/0858.html>threads from 9 years ago. Why is there no Unicode Copyleft symbol? All
    > arguments against it that may have held anything that long ago no longer do
    >
    >
    > Thank you,
    > .danny
    >
    > > Proponents of the reversed copyright sign need to demonstrate, like
    >> > everyone else, that the proposed character is in actual use.
    >> As you might remember, the original intent for the copyleft character
    >> inquiry comes from the groff (GNU troff) developer team. We are about
    >> to move all documentation to the GNU Free Documentation License, a
    >> copyleft license scheme available at
    >> http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html.
    >> During this transition process, we recognized that there is no Unicode
    >> character for the copyleft symbol. As our aim is (was?) to integrate
    >> Unicode more deeply into the groff type-setting system, we delayed the
    >> transition process.
    >> So the 20+ documents in the groff package are supposed to use the
    >> copyleft character, many thousands of documents in other GNU software
    >> packages are on hold or actually do.
    >> No doubt, you know about the strong market position of free software, so
    >> you wouldn't want to have the unicode mail-list flooded with thousands
    >> of mails proving or wanting to use of the character in question, would
    >> you?
    >> > If you can find actual software documentation that says, for example,
    >> > "Copyleft * 2000 by Bernd Warken" (where * substitutes for the
    >> > copyleft symbol), then that would be more convincing evidence of the
    >> > need to encode the character.
    >> There are such documents. The manual pages groff(7), groff_tmac(5), and
    >> roff(7) were written by me, with the legal ownership donated to the Free
    >> Software Foundation. We would really like to use the copyleft sign as
    >> soon as possible - with some U+xxxx code.
    >> Bernd Warken <bwarken@mayn.de>
    >>
    >
    > Aren't private-use characters to be used within relatively small,
    >> well-contained organizations? ...hence the "private" in "private-use".
    >> The copyleft idea, and now the copyleft character, will be used by a very
    >> large number of people, or will at least be viewed by potentially many,
    >> many people...with some people being part of the same organization, but
    >> most coming from different ones. This would require different people
    >> around
    >> the world to agree upon the code point of the character, which makes it a
    >> quasi-standard, which seems exactly opposite the purpose of private-use
    >> characters.
    >> Just stirring up dust,
    >> John O'Conner
    >> Markus Scherer wrote:
    >> > sounds to me like a private-use character, similar to the apple symbol.
    >> > markus
    >>
    >
    >
    >
    > --
    > ☮♥Ⓐ - http://www.google.com/profiles/danny.piccirillo
    >



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