Not all clouds are grey, and when the snow lies thick and white in the Swedish midwinter landscape the world looks surprisingly bright. This is my collection of 2010 copyleft highlights.

An Avignon, France speech by Neelie Kroes paints a progressive picture of coprights gone too far. How to interpret this? It appears to be something in the air because Ireland and United Kingdom also want to evaluate their copyright laws to see if perhaps, !, copyright is far too strict and therefore limits innovation. All the while commissioner Viviane Reding has worked hard for access to orphan works, and simpler licensing systems for literary works adapted for the visually impaired.

A one-man army in India has made the entire political establishment, as well as IP lawyers, agree with him in his struggle for fair sharing of incomes from movie productions. The Bollywood distributor are, of course, claiming to witness their iminent demise, but the general view seems to be that even the compromise proposal is, if anything, overestimating the distributors' importance in film prouction.

In a surprising move, Zambian record lables and musicians have gotten the idea to fight piracy through providing better services than pirates hoping that consumers for this reason will opt for a superior, but not without cost, alternative. The gain is expected to be higher incomes, and less expenses for court processes.

In Sweden Flattr opened their doors for non-rightsbased income distribution for the culture sector. The remuneration system is available for digitally distributed culture but is better explained by their introduction video than by me. :-)

German activist Telekommunisten has created a culture license with emphasis on non-commercial access to culture but, as opposed to copyleft and creative commons with additional exception clauses for small scale commercial use by startups, social movements and cooperatives. Innovation through access and camaraderie!

Neither Dutch nor Belgian courts find it necessary to block access to webpages whose illegality has not been established. In Sweden we are (hopefully) awaiting similar verdicts. An Irish court further found that French laws do not create a legal obligation for Irish internet service providers to terminate their users' subscriptions.

In a moment of democratic service the Spanish parliament choose to listen to the large groups of Spanish citizens protesting a law limiting internet freedom. Hasta el futuro y la libertad!

To wrap up, it seems that Russia want GPL licensed code in their government administration. A preliminary report from the Russian Pirate Party says that GPL in reality is not compatible with Russian copyright legislation at all, but one would assume that in a country with such high levels of corruption the government doesn't necessarily need to care ;-)