Change.gov's Creative Commons License. What Does It Mean?

President Elect Barack Obama's transition team recently adopted a Creative Commons 3.0 license for Change.gov, the official transition website.

What does that mean?

According to the license, visitors can copy, distribute, display, and perform material from the site, as well as to remix it, as long as the work is attributed to its source.

What does that mean?

It means that the Obama team is taking this 'open government thing' pretty darn seriously. People will be free to take any material from the site, and do what they wish with it (hopefully constructively) to their heart's content.

Interestingly enough, if this were an 'official' government site, there would be no need for this license as all work would be in the public domain. But since it isn't, the site previously had an 'all rights reserved' claim on it -- meaning you can't just lift material from the site without explicit permission from the Obama team.

So until January 20th, feel free to take Change.gov content and turn it into song lyrics, spoken word performances, leaflets, fliers, and desktop wallpaper -- just make sure you attribute it to the source.

And get this -- after January 20th, you're still cool. Public domain, baby.

More on this from Lawrence Lessig.