Python, the programming language in which reddit is written, is Copyright © 1990-2006, Python Software Foundation. The components of reddit's python code, such as the CherryPy WSGI components, are Copyright (c) 2004-2007, CherryPy Team and others.
Lighttpd, the web server used by reddit's servers, is Copyright (c) 2004, Jan Kneschke.
The project management and bug tracking software for Lighttpd (and CherryPy) is Trac, Copyright © 2003-2006 Edgewall Software.
Much of the more popular content (xkcd, newspapers, other sites) are also under various copyrights and accompanying licences.
So much for the official stance.
Now, unofficially and despite the widespread preference for copyrighted material (see the "more popular content" statement above) there seems to be broad support among the reddit user base to actually abolish copyright, as exemplified in a recent top-rated link Why you SHOULD be a pirate. The discussion even invaded the apolitical sanctity of my beloved programming subreddit in the form of the link Copyright infringement is not theft. In both discussions, there seems to be quite widespread support for getting rid of copyright.
I find this quite ironic given the nature of reddit as a copyrighted product, its base of copyrighted software, and particularly the interest in the form of upvotes of all sorts of copyrighted material. Perhaps the same anti-copyright discussion could be had on a completely public domain message board somewhere, but I am not aware of any internet-capable public domain operating systems. I encourage those among the redditor crowd who believe strongly in their anti-copyright stance to produce a public domain software stack upon which to discuss this topic and with which to distribute their public domain art, music, and film.
I would join them in contributing software and photography, the latter of mine of which primarily ends up in the Wikimedia Commons under a ShareAlike license, but I am certainly willing to put my code and photographs where my mouth is. I wonder if any of the redditors who so strongly support the anti-copyright movement would really do the same?
Further irony: the majority of Gnutella and BitTorrent clients are copyrighted software (several even completely proprietary). The famous Pirate Party of Sweden goes the step of clearly marking their internet content No copyright, Piratpartiet, 2006–2007, but something interesting happens when you connect to their web server:
sam@sol:~/projects/erlang/sway$ telnet www2.piratpartiet.se 80
Trying 217.198.145.137...
Connected to kaukbacken.homelinux.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www2.piratpartiet.se
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2007 20:06:13 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.1-pl3-gentoo
You guessed it. Apache, PHP, and Gentoo (a Linux distribution)? All copyrighted software.
I welcome our new public domain overlords. Copyright is dead. Long live the public domain. It would be nice to see proponents of the anti-copyright movement eat their own cooking, though, and to take at least a few moments to notice the hypocrisy and irony of the situation when they do not.
Draconian DRM and the seemingly limitless extensions on the duration of copyright are an issue. Copyright itself is a good. To verify this, simply check the "Help -> About" menu of your browser for its copyright information.
