I just want to officially state how happy I am that the content of Change.gov has been officially licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license. I also have a response and a concern.
The response is to those that ask "but aren’t creations of the federal government automatically in the public domain?" Well, yes, but the content of Change.gov is coming out of the "office of the president-elect" which isn’t officially part of the federal government. Additionally, Obama has given up his Senate seat so he’s no longer part of the federal government either. That is, not until January 20th. Then, he gets control of Whitehouse.gov and that’s in the public domain.
The concern is about the page on Change.gov that has the license: http://change.gov/about/copyright_policy. The CC license is listed under the heading of "Copyright Notice". Trouble is, CC isn’t Copyright. Copyright is a law, Creative Commons is a license. A picky detail I’m sure, but an important one.
