Creative Commons Added to Office

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.