Obama frees Change.gov under CC license
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- In a sign which bodes well for the future, US president-elect Barack Obama has opened up his Change.gov site under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
It now says »»»
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.
“This is great news about a subject that’s harder than it seems,” blogs Stanford law professor Larry Lessig, who originated the Creative Commons concept.
Copyright law is prettyt good at is exempting works of the government from copyright protection, he says, going on:
“Why should the published work of a transition, or a President, be any different?
“I don’t think it should be, but I get why this is a hard issue. Whether or not one was free to republish works printed by the GPO, the freedom that digital technologies enables here is certainly enough to give one pause. I’m fine with the pause; I’d be happy to defend the freedom explicitly. But it is understandable that this is something that any administration would have to think through.
“I’m glad the thought in this administration led to the right conclusion, so quickly, and in the midst of so much else going on.”
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December 5th, 2008 at 2:09 am
A step in the right direction, now let’s see if it’s followed through.
December 7th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Wow… just wow…
Obama’s going in the right direction.