# Congratulations America and thanks for bringing CC to the White House

- Author: Joichi Ito
- Date: 2009-01-20T18:14:00Z


First of all, a teary-eyed congratulations to all of my friends in America. I'm really proud of and happy for the Americans and I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for making such a great choice and proving to us that democracy works in America. My faith in America has increased substantially today and I look forward to the leadership it may provide.

I'll write more about this when I calm down a bit and get some sleep. (It's 3AM here.)

However, before I went to bed I wanted to thank President Obama and his team for bringing a copyright notice to the White House website which includes Creative Commons. Thank you very much.

Creative Commons Blog

Whitehouse.gov's 3rd Party Content Under CC-BY 

As you may of heard, the new Whitehouse.gov launched today at 12:01pm during Barack Obama's inauguration. What you might not have noticed is that the copyright policy of the site stipulates that all 3rd party content is licensed under our most permissive Attribution license:

Pursuant to federal law, government-produced materials appearing on this site are not copyright protected. The United States Government may receive and hold copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.

Except where otherwise noted, third-party content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Visitors to this website agree to grant a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to the rest of the world for their submissions to Whitehouse.gov under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
 (emphasis added)
Congratulations to the 44th President of the US for choosing CC!