[sf-lug] Obama's change.gov now using Creative Commons

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Larry Cafiero (larry.cafiero at gmail.com):

> So doesn't that make the CC license somewhat moot, even as it relates to the
> content under the President-elect's site?

Oh, and by the way:  The new policy statement published at
http://change.gov/about/copyright_policy is one that will prospectively
apply to all contributions to the change.gov site by _all users_ of that
site.  The site appears to include quite a lot of Web-forum and similar
features for public participation.

(The point is, Mr. Obama and crew are thus hardly the only relevant
copyright stakeholders.)

The idea is, of course, that any author of a creative work gains
copyright title over what he/she writes, at the moment the work appears
"in fixed form" -- and, if posting an instance of that work somewhere
operated by a third party (such as change.gov) implicitly grants some
kind of licence by so doing.  The new posted licence aims to ensure that
new contributors are exposed to that statement, and so arguably are
including Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 permissions among the rights
they give out when posting.

If you wanted to make trouble, you _could_ (say) post a comment on
change.gov with this footer:

    This posting is Copyright (C) 2008 Larry Cafiero.  I do NOT grant
    Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licensing terms for this comment,
    and require that anyone re-using any portion of this post for any purpose 
    whatsoever acquire specific permission for that re-usage from me, first.

Odds are, that would (1) be legally binding and (2) get the post deleted.  ;->