[Infowarrior] - Creative Commons comes to Microsoft Office

[Richard Forno]

Creative Commons comes to Microsoft Office

By Martin LaMonica
http://news.com.com/Creative+Commons+comes+to+Microsoft+Office/2100-1032_3-6
086018.html

Story last modified Tue Jun 20 21:00:04 PDT 2006

Microsoft and the Creative Commons on Wednesday plan to release a free tool
that will let people attach a Creative Commons copyright license to
Microsoft Office documents.

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that has written licenses that
allow content creators to share information while retaining some rights.

Currently, some Web-based tools let people associate a Creative Commons
license with information. But Microsoft is the first vendor to embed a
license-selection option inside its applications, said Lawrence Lessig, the
founder of the Creative Commons and a Stanford Law School professor.
Creative Commons in Office

"This is important to us because a huge amount of creative work is created
inside the Office platform. Having a simple way to add Creative Commons
licenses obviously helps us spread those licenses much more broadly," Lessig
said.

Once installed, the license-selection software will appear as a menu option
in the Microsoft Office application.

It will generate a Creative Commons logo, a short summary of the license
chosen, and a hyperlink to the Creative Commons Web site. People can
download the software from the Creative Commons Web site or from Microsoft
Office Online.

Microsoft and Creative Commons have collaborated on other projects, but the
Office tool is the most significant effort to date, said Tom Rubin,
assistant general counsel at Microsoft.

"We very much share a common belief that creators of works should be able to
express their intentions with regard to subsequent use, and Creative Commons
has created exciting ways to have works shared freely or have works reused
by others," Rubin said.

He said there are 400 million users of Microsoft Office applications.
Microsoft contracted with 3Sharp, a Redmond, Wash.-based consultant to build
and test the copyright licensing tool.

The first document to be created with the Office plug-in tool will be a
speech about globalism by Gilberto Gil, the Brazilian musician who is now
the minister of culture in Brazil.

Lessig said that Creative Commons continues to explore ways to attach
licenses to other types of content such as video and audio files.

However, Microsoft has not yet decided to make a license-selection tool for
its Windows Media creation software, Rubin said.

"It's something we'll certainly look at," he said. "We're certainly open to
it."


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