Thank you Mr President!
Published by elliott bledsoe on Tuesday, 2 December 2008 at 9:24 AMHow exciting! American President-elect Barack Obama has taken a bold but very welcomed move, deciding to release the content of the Office of the President-Elect website, Change.gov, under a Creative Commons Attribution licence (interestingly a BY 3.0 Unported, not a BY 3.0 United States, I wonder why that is?). Both Creative Commons and Lawrence Lessig are happily reporting this exciting new too. Perhaps this is signs of things to come?
Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Content includes all materials posted by the Obama-Biden Transition project. Visitors to this website agree to grant a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to the rest of the world for their submissions to Change.gov under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.What is important about this is true openness. It is not just a superficial gesture towards open and transparent government. The choice of licensing under an Attribution licence–the most permissive and liberal CC licence–demonstrates a real commitment to ensuring that. Sure, §105 of the American Copyright Law means that lots of stuff government owned is in the public domain, but if I remember rightly there are some exceptions for certain agencies. Is the transition organisation exempt? I don't know. Likewise, won't most of it move into the public domain after Inauguration? I don't know enough about the exceptions to tell you. Regardless, any contributions from members of the public well most certainly gain domestic copyright protection and this is a way to ensure that they stay open.
UPDATE: The entry at Creative Commons clarifies this:
Several people have pointed out that “works created by an agency of the United States government are public domain at the moment of creation” (see Wikipedia for more on this). Change.gov is not currently the project of a government agency, but a 501(c)(4) that has been set up to manage the Obama-Biden transition. Also, the public is being invited to contribute their own comments and works to the site, and it is important to have a clear marking of the permissions that other people have to this material.
You'll pass this on, won't you:
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