Obama-Biden transition site Change.gov now under a Creative Commons license

Change.gov, the website of US president-elect Barack Obama’s transition team, has undergone some important and exciting changes over the past few days. Among them is the site’s new copyright notice, which expresses that the bulk of Change.gov is published under the most permissive of Creative Commons copyright licenses - CC BY.

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.

This is great news and a encouraging sign that the new administration has a clear sense of the importance of openness in government and on the web (there’s a bit more on this over at Lessig’s blog). The embrace of Creative Commons licensing on Change.gov is consistent with earlier support by both Obama and McCain for the idea of “open debates.” (It’s also in line with Obama’s decision to publish the pictures in his Flickr Photostream under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license - pretty cool!)

Tim O’Reilly has written a smart post (which has elicited some very thoughtful reader comments) recommending that Change.gov use revision control as a way to further improve transparency and make it possible for the public to review any changes that occur on the site. Of course, licensing is just one component of openness, but getting licensing right is necessary for enabling people to truly take advantage of technologies that facilitate collaboration.

Update: Several people have pointed out that “works created by an agency of the United States government are public domain at the moment of creation” (see Wikipedia for more on this). Change.gov is not currently the project of a government agency, but a 501(c)(4) that has been set up to manage the Obama-Biden transition. Also, the public is being invited to contribute their own comments and works to the site, and it is important to have a clear marking of the permissions that other people have to this material.

Resource - Creative Commons

Ubuntu launches Free Culture Showcase

The Ubuntu project has announced the launch of its second Free Culture Showcase initiative. The developers behind the popular Linux distribution are giving artists in the free culture community a unique opportunity to have their creative works included in the next major version of Ubuntu.

Participants can submit music, video clips, or images, which will be evaluated by a panel of judges. The winning items will be included on the Ubuntu 9.04 Live CD and in the default installation. In order to qualify, all creative works submitted to the contest must be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license, which permits modification and redistribution of content.

"The Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase is an opportunity to bring the best of two great worlds together by showing off high quality Free Culture content in Ubuntu," wrote Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon in a blog entry. "The winning submissions will be made available on the shipped CDs and download images of the Ubuntu 9.04 release. Every user will be able to find the content in the Examples/ folder in a home directory."

The showcase will be accepting submissions until February 6. A panel of judges will choose an assortment of the best submissions and then the Ubuntu Community Council will select the actual winners from among those finalists. There is a limited amount of space on the installation CD for including free culture art, so submissions must stay within the size constraints dictated by the contest rules. For more details, see the Free Culture Showcase page at the Ubuntu wiki and the announcement at the official Creative Commons blog.

Resource - Ars Technica