It seems almost like one of those press releases from two high-tech companies announcing a partnership that willl be taken to their respective markets.

Here's the first part:

Microsoft enables Creative Commons licensing in Office

Digg This!

Kudos to Microsoft for making it possible for users of their Office suite (now numbering 400 million) to easily apply a Creative Commons license to the work they author using the applications in that productivity suite. In a press release issued yesterday, Microsoft announced that a new add-in will allow the full range of Creative Commons licenses to be attached to documents created with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to make the reuse or republication rights to an original work clear. It's a welcome acknowledgement of the plain-English approach to intellectual property championed by the Creative Commons organization.


... followed by the obligatory one-or-two sentence "why this is great for us and everybody else" statement from the key people in the respective organizations.

“We’re delighted to work with Creative Commons to bring fresh and collaborative thinking on copyright licensing to authors and artists of all kinds,” said Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft.

[Snip ... ]

Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of Creative Commons ... “We’re incredibly excited to work with Microsoft to make that ability easily available to the hundreds of millions of users of Microsoft Office.”



My sense is that this is one of the final nails confirming that various  Creative Commons licenses will be attached to creative work of all sorts  (a blog post, an article, an essay, a review).  All that is left now are all the court cases that will shape and heft to what is meant by the Creative Commons licenses that come to be commonly used.

Tags: , , ,

Powered by Qumana