Here's an early work in compostion studies which positions the future of copyleft
in academic publishing. In "A Meshing of Minds: The Future of Online Research
for Print and Electronic Publication" (from Barber and Grigar's New
Worlds, New Words, 2001) Michael Day paints a new view for academic publishing
via the web as a highly collaborative medium in which scholars will share their
work more freely. In building this vision, his text examines "the ways in which the Internet and the Web
will allow research to become even more collaborative, and the possibility that
many of the researchers who collaborate will care much less about who owns ideas
and who gets credit for them than they do about making those ideas available
to the widest possible audience" (252).

For example, Day notes how easily ideas can be disseminated on the Web, although
seemingly idealistically clinging to the information wants to be free vision
of the Internet in a way that does not consider the potential for commercial
lock down of much electronic content. Or perhaps its just enough to interpret DRM as a consequnce of the factors that Day cites; however, the tone of the text often leads me toward some unrealistic optimism in light of today's copyfight: "And because webbed publications
generally are not purchased, they can spread further, into more hands that need
them. These factors problematize issues of ownership, copyright, and originality,
and will force the research and publication community to recast ethical and
legal constraints on the usage and sharing of information" (252).

Access to electronic texts is more problematic than this because of the very issues that Day suggests. Perhaps we have a long ways to go to reach his vision because academics need to catch up to the content industries and impose their views on digital media ownership. Day notes that "many of the new electronic scholars," those researchers
who are used to communicating via computer networks to discuss their research,
"are willing to share ideas freely, so ownership is not so important. .
. . Electronic media are going to force a change in the notions of originality,
ownership of ideas, and copyright soon, because of the sheer impossibility of
preventing ideas and texts from spreading, from being reproduced infinitely
and effortlessly, like viruses" (262).

So I don't believe that electronic media will force a revision of these notions, but rather more so that the researchers who share this more utopian vision will. They will move, as Day is doing, toward copyleft as "the future of copyright", a necessary model for sharing academic texts since "the cost
of production and dissemination associated with print publication virtually
vanishes for online works, many works should be available for free, without
restrictions aside from acknowledgement" (267). Day continues by discusing
Michael Stutz's ideas from Applying
Copyleft to Non-Software Information (267-268), including a quote from
Stutz which highlights the social constructionist nature of copyleft:

With computers, perfect copies of a digital work can easily be made -- and
even modified, or further distributed -- by others, with no loss of the original
work. As individuals interact in cyberia, sharing information -- then reacting
and building upon it -- is not only natural, but this is the only way for individual
beings to thrive in a community. In essence, the idea of copyleft is basic to
the natural propagation of digital information among humans in a society. This
is why the regular notion of copyright does not make sense in the context of
cyberia.

In the conclusion, Day stresses that copyleft can insure attribution while
also enabling works to be "shared freely" (269). Sharing is what it's all about. Now if we just had more scholars in my discipline with his vision . . .