by Jason Fischer
I’m no fan of our President-elect, but I have to tip my hat to him on this interesting bit of P.R.:
The new administration’s transition site, Change.gov, is being published under a Creative Commons license. (source) This means that the content is not subject to the draconian, life-plus-70 protection that is the default under the current federal copyright act. Does this mean that our next president may be in favor of copyright reform? One can only dream.
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This is probably going to be a ridiculously naive comment – I know the purpose behind CC licenses are to circumvent copyright legislation to an extent – but I just don’t believe CC licenses are as groundbreaking as they claim to be. The actual CC license itself does not disclaim copyright ownership – copyright owners are still entitled to copyright protection (i.e. the right to sue for infringement of an exclusive right reserved to the owner), they have simply limited the scope of infringements, damages and recovery to the terms of the license rather than the far more restrictive provisions in the Copyright Act. (Granted, any likely recovery would be for breach of contract rather than copyright infringement, and would likely be for de minimis value…)
A far more liberal (read: forward-thinking) approach for the transition team would be to declare all materials on the site to be in the public domain.
Slight cloud over the whole thing is that all federal work is public domain.
Yes, works by the federal government are not subject to copyright protection, but a “work of the United States government” is defined as: “”a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person’s official duties.” As Obama is not yet the President, and as his team of advisors are not employees of the United States Government, they are not designing a site as part of their official duties to the United States Government, therefore the material is still protected.
In response to Tara’s first comment re. CC not being groundbreaking. I agree to the extent that there is a lot of hype around it, yet it still remains primarily embraced by the IP-geeks.
However, I do think there is a huge benefit to using a CC license if you are a content creator and you want to allow some uses of your work that might fall outside of fair use (which remains intact). For me, the beauty of the CC license is that it immediately tells a prospective user what can and cannot be done with a work. If I see a photo, video, or song online that has a CC license, I can quickly determine what right I have to use the work. It’s immediate negotiation.
Interesting, I hadn’t thought that it wasn’t created by federal gov’t employees.
Thanks for pointing that out.