• Illustration: Creative Commons License Choices

A new wizard for Office lets users easily add Creative Commons copyrights to their documents. It could also help lead to wider use of flexible copyrights and builds a bridge between Microsoft and open-source communities, which often see the company as hostile to their efforts.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons (CC) was founded by a group of cyberlaw experts in 2001 to wrestle with the challenge of protecting digital data released on the Internet, which has led to massive copyright infringement. It aimed to find a middle ground between traditional "all rights reserved" copyrights, which give end users little or no rights, and "public domain," which provides no protection for the initial creator, and to preserve the Internet's long history of shared contributions.

The group developed a set of copyright licenses covering text documents, Web pages, photos, videos, lesson plans, and even architectural designs. All these licenses require that work be attributed to its creator, but give end users varying rights, such as commercial use or the creation and distribution of derivative works.

Once applied to a document or image, a CC license is irrevocable, although the copyright holder is free to permit other forms of use. For example, a document can have a non-commercial CC license but can be independently licensed for commercial use if a commercial user gets permission from the copyright holder.

Office Wizard

The Creative Commons utility in Office helps users decide which Creative Commons license they wish to use. (For the license choices offered, see the illustration "Creative Commons License Choices"). It then places a hyperlink in the document that points to a Creative Commons Web page describing the rights in more detail.

Greater use of Creative Commons licenses could prove useful to people who distribute their work in digital form, and also to advertising and media organizations, which sometimes are unable to identify the creator of work they would like to use.

It could also lead to more flexible use of copyrights on the Internet that give creators credit and some control over their work while still allowing for sharing, reuse, and even derivative works.

Finally, Microsoft's participation in the effort may temper the company's image as hostile to open-source or derivative licensing schemes and position Office as a good tool for creating documents that will be widely shared.

Creative Commons is at www.creativecommons.org.