Change.gov goes Creative Commons

Obama's Change.gov site has dropped its "All Rights Reserved" notice and switched to the Creative Commons Attribution license, the most liberal of the CC licenses. change.gov set free (Thanks, Simon!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Jayel Aheram

When I heard about this, I was actually a little bit peeved. For one thing, anything posted online by a governmental agency is public domain. But some of the commenters did point out that it might be because Obama has not been inaugurated yet.

CC license requires copyright. It does not exist without it.
Simon Cameron

Xeni briefly posted the same news item, but it included some interesting links. Any chance we could have it repeated here?
John H.

Hey, at least the President-elect’s campaign even knows what the heck Creative Commons is and why it’s important.
Cloudform

Anything hosted on a .gov should be public domain. CC is too restrictive. Right direction, though.
SamSam

Wow, these guys really do know how to make the blogger world fall head-over-heels in blind love.

However, I wonder of both the original and the new copyright notices aren’t incorrect. If this counts as a “Work created by federal government employees as part of their official responsibility,” isn’t it all Fair Use anyway?
Jacksonbaker323

From the wikipedia

“Works created by an agency of the United States government are public domain at the moment of creation. Examples include military journalism, federal court opinions (but not necessarily state court opinions), congressional committee reports, and census data. However, works created by a contractor for the government are still subject to copyright. Even public domain documents may have their availability limited by laws limiting the spread of classified information.”

So its public domain no matter what they put on the page.
Johnny One Spur

Just out of curiosity, though…Obama’s not President yet (and I believe he’s resigned his Senate seat), and his transition team may be hired by him or the party, but they’re not in their actual official government jobs yet. Aren’t they all in a kind of limbo until the inauguration? So would stuff produced by the transition team technically be a “Work created by an agency of the United States government”? That said, they managed to get a .gov domain, so…
Dave Bullock (eecue)

Still a good gesture. Also I have a feeling some of the site was created by private contractors, which may not fall under the same public domain laws.
jahknow

#3 Jacksonbaker323, I’ve read (maybe on BB) that this .GOV domain was granted to, and is run by, Obama’s C4 transition organization. Assuming that’s still true, this (surprisingly) isn’t a government web site. Unfortunately.

Also, Remix My Policy, Wonks!
frijole

@ #3 JACKSONBAKER323

You say right in your epic copy and paste job: “However, works created by a contractor for the government are still subject to copyright.”

Its just as fair to assume the Change.gov team are contractors as it is to assume they’re government employees, so its not “public domain no matter what they put on the page”.
jahknow

http://directory.presidentialtransition.gov/
Simon Cameron

Obama + Creative Commons = 100% chance of finding a place on BoingBoing.
Simon Cameron

For the record, I think the most important part of this is not that we are now free to remix Change.gov (as previous posters have mentioned, that was always possible), but that the Obama team is clearly aware of, and sympathetic to the goals of CC.
Kieran O’Neill

:)

Well, it’s a step in the right direction. Also, they have IP lawyers, and I suspect (at least hope) they’ve worked out the IP issues before doing this. If they have, then I suspect that they have concluded that they are not technically part of the government yet, and not obliged to release everything PD.

Oh, and Obama as guestblogger would be too awesome for words. They’d probably have to disable comments, though…
Brainspore

If these guys were government employees yet then I don’t think Obama’s campaign could still be asking me for money to fund the transition team. Wouldn’t that count as some kind of bribe?