The Laboratorium: Change.gov Is Under a Creative Commons License

Change.gov Is Under a Creative Commons License

James Grimmelmann
1:09 PM
November 30, 2008

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.

Talk about doing the right thing. Now the collaborative power of Change.gov isn’t limited by what the transition team itself is able to enable. Anyone can take the policy points and discussions from the site and create their own remix or branch of it. This is a very good sign of the transition team’s attitude towards their task. It’s also a good license choice. Attribution 3.0 is the Barack Obama of CC licenses: modern, dignified, generous, and tolerant.

Peter
10:45 PM
December 1, 2008

Uh excuse me - I don’t need a creative commons license from Obama. See since Americans pay for him, his house, his gas, his security, his cars, his EVERYTHING - well I can pretty much do what I want with the content over at the 1.0 website change.gov.

Oh what a visionary???!!! Yeah okay. LOL

James Grimmelmann
11:20 PM
December 1, 2008

Peter: I agree that the Transition Team’s work ought to be considered uncopyrightable as a U.S. government work. (Emphasis on “ought to be”; courts might not agree.) But without the Creative Commons license, you couldn’t necessarily do useful and interesting things with all the suggestions, comments, and other content that people will be uploading to Change.gov as part of the discussions of where the country should be going.

kthxbye

Titus
1:44 AM
December 2, 2008

The Obama-Biden Transition Project is a not-for-profit private corporation; it is not an agency of the federal government.

Ross Nicholson
4:20 AM
December 2, 2008

Hi James!

Great thing you’re doing. However, some of the stuff I’ve shared with the transition are already copyrighted by me. A lot more is really rather personal and some more may breach confidentiality expected of me. I don’t suppose there’s a way to opt out, is there? I’ve been a trusted non-public advisor to three presidents, but this is a bit strange to me. I hope you understand why I’m asking. Since there was no way of accessing everyone else’s job applications/contributions, I presumed reasonably that confidentiality was the rule rather than full disclosure. For goodness sake, some of that stuff is highly classified, too.

James Grimmelmann
10:22 AM
December 2, 2008

Titus: Yes, but change.gov is a governmental resource directed towards a governmental function. It’s like model legislation; the contents don’t need copyright’s incentives.

Ross: The short answer is that copyright and confidentiality are different animals. You should definitely reach out to the transition project and let them know that some of the submissions you’ve made shouldn’t be made public. Nothing in the copyright license requires them to make anything public. (And, for obvious reasons, the license can’t apply to things that people have already submitted, only to things that they submit going forward.)

Ranjit Mathoda
1:25 PM
December 2, 2008

If you’re interested in how an Obama presidency may use the Internet, you may find my March 2008 essay The Coming Digital Presidency of interest: http://digitalpresidency.com

pete.forsyth
3:37 PM
December 3, 2008

test (keep getting bad character error)

pete.forsyth
3:43 PM
December 3, 2008

I’m interested in any thoughts on my comments at the bottom of this blog post: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/11081

(For some reason, I can’t copy it over here, I keep getting an error message that I can’t figure out. But I’m watching this blog now.)

James Grimmelmann
4:55 PM
December 3, 2008

Pete: I’ve responded to your thoughts over on the Creative Commons blog entry. The error has to do with pasting in text that contains smart quotes. I’ll see if I can make my blog software smarter, as it were, about that.

pete.forsyth
5:41 PM
December 3, 2008

Great, thanks — I thought I tried removing all the smart quotes, I suspected that. Must have missed one.

I’ll check your answer.

Oh and by the way, on another subject — you published an excellent writeup of our problem with laws and copyright in Oregon. It was a great help to us as we persuaded Legislative Counsel to reverse its decision.

Now, we’re seeking legislative action to follow that up. Take a look at this wiki page if you have a moment:

http://pdx.wiki.org/OregonGovernment2.0_bill

pete.forsyth
5:42 PM
December 3, 2008

http://pdx.wiki.org/OregonGovernment2.0_bill

arrg, me and the sloppy posts. Sorry!

pete.forsyth
5:43 PM
December 3, 2008

OK, so it doesn’t like underscores either? Once and for all:

http://tinyurl.com/6crllx

Comment Preview: