Change.gov Swaps Traditional Copyright for Creative Commons

In what appears to be a major shift away from traditional copyright policy, the www.change.gov team Obama site has embraced the Creative Commons license this past weekend.

From their web site, www.creativecommons.org “uses private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare “some rights reserved.”  Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry.”

This shift could allow for some innovative uses of the content from Change.gov.  Stay tuned.

Mary Van Sickle, Executive Director
Dakota Media Access (formerly Community Access Television)