If you are working with digital files, and have a work in some digital file format, you can publish it with a "copyleft" license. This isn't viable for works not processed and published in some form that can be kept in a computer file; so it won't work for something like traditional analog film.

The effect is that your work, in the verbatim packaging and presentation it was published, suddenly becomes widely accessible across computer networks. It also means that anyone can distribute this verbatim copy, and -- under further rights given by the copyleft -- anyone can sample from the copy in some other work, or otherwise make a derivative. But these derivatives and other works each must be licensed in the same way you licensed your original work. Meaning of course that all of these new works are accessible in full to you and to everybody else. The effect is of a new, shared commons of work, that is available to anyone, and accessible from anywhere.

As a publisher, you might sell a larger distribution containing sources (with music, for instance, publishers of copylefted albums sell them on DVD). Or you dual-license it, and sell it in some other form. Authors and publishers can profit from such works, and have done so. The success of Linux has proven that copyleft works, that it works to advance science and the useful arts. So what next?

Outside of software program source code, the practice of copyleft and its use is still largely untested, and has special considerations which may be troublesome. Yet there have been many "open source" licenses made for all kinds of works, from technical documentation to recordings of music, but this approach to the problem seems like a bad idea. The reason is that each of these licenses effectively makes its own "commons," incompatible with the others. And each of these licenses limits use of the work to other, like works -- music recordings, for example, can't be used in movies. Clips from movies can't be used as icons. Even the venerable software licenses are special-case licenses, and equally at fault: no "open source" software license currently allows you to, for example, quote part of the program listing in a book!

The licensing must be uniform so as establish a single commons. The Design Science License (DSL) was intended to prove that, and I believe it has -- it's been used on many works since then, from published books and music to software and images.

The DSL is not, however, a long-term solution. It was an experiment. We're currently in a transitional period, and the question remains the same as before: how to facilitate a shared commons, where publishers who willfully participate may release work to their protection and potentially their profit, and in a way that the works can be shared and examined in full by anyone, so that civilization may progress.

Further Information

The Design Science License (DSL)
http://dsl.org/

plugincinema article on Copyright and MP3

Michael Stutz is an open source advocate, writer and author of the Linux Cookbook ("Beginners will find this book invaluable..There is plenty of good information to be had in these pages..."–Slashdot)