Joi Ito's conversation with the living web.

Change.gov - Now Creative Commons licensed »

Joichi Ito
Dec 01, 2008 - 16:21 UTC »

Creative Commons Blog

Change.gov, the website of US president-elect Barack Obama's transition team, has undergone some important and exciting changes over the past few days. Among them is the site's new copyright notice, which expresses that the bulk of change.gov is published under the most permissive of Creative Commons copyright licenses - CC BY.

Change.gov

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.

I know the transition team is super-busy right now with very important things and I'm very thankful that they had the time and the will to pay attention to this kind of important detail. Thanks a lot Barack Obama and the transition team!

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2 Comments

01. Thomas - Dec 02, 2008 - 06:56 Reply

How is this better than just being public domain? I am a huge CC supporter, but that said why does this really matter, government especially in the US ought to be completely open source. Just curious.

02. Joichi Ito - Dec 02, 2008 - 09:34 Reply

From the CC Blog:

Update: 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.

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