change.gov changes its copyright statement, gets it *almost* right
Submitted by jrjacobs on Sun, 2008-11-30 22:21.
We've been following the Obama transition team's change.gov site for a few weeks now and were dismayed that the change.gov site had been copyrighted -- remember, government documents, including Web sites in the .gov domain, are in the public domain according to copyright law.
I was just alerted by a tweet from John Wonderlich, that change.gov has changed their copyright statement to a Creative Commons attribution license -- meaning visitors are 1) free to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work; and 2) to Remix/adapt the work as long as they "attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor." That CC license is "approved for free cultural works."
While I applaud the change to a creative commons license as a step in the right direction, I still believe that change.gov -- and all .gov sites -- need to be explicitly in the public domain (which as you remember is a statutory requirement According to Copyright Law 17 U.S.C. § 105). If site administrators wanted the geek street cred that comes with creative commons, why didn't they choose the creative commons public domain dedication?
This is an open government issue; the public domain is critical to open and transparent government operations. If the Obama administration is serious about ethics and open government, then they will change their copyright statement on change.gov and donate the site's information to the public domain. Is that so much to ask? If you agree, please contact the change.gov administrator(s) and politely but strongly urge them to support the public domain. I just did.
--that is all.
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Contacted Change.gov
I just contacted them again. Thanks for the heads up!
similarities of govt information and data
Another point to ponder: Jim Jacobs and I were talking about Creative Commons for data and came across this interesting blog post from Jonathan Rochkind, "Creative Commons is not appropriate for data." Jonathan astutely argues that one can't put a creative commons license on data because, "if you don’t own a copyright in the first place, there’s no way to license it under Creative Commons." That is, since numbers/facts can't be copyrighted (like the telephone book), they therefore cannot be cc licensed since cc/gpl etc assumes that someone has copyright. Extending Jonathan's argument to government information, since government information (and by extension a govt Website) is statutorily in the public domain, no one has copyright over it and it therefore cannot be cc licensed! Did I hear minds explode? Thoughts?
*mind exploded*
Like I said to you earlier...I want to bang my head against the wall. I understand that copyright is a tricky issue to learn, but you would think whoever is behind the creation of change.gov would know better. This is very frustrating.
"US Gov Work" -- a copyright category of its own
The Creative Commons "Public Domain" label for government works is not appropriate. Significant differences from other works in the “public domain” warrant that they be identified and labeled in category of their own -- as "US Government Work(s)."
• DEFINITION
• Government works: Statute 17 USC Sec 101 and 105
• Public Domain: Case law based on statute exclusion
• CRITERIA
• Government works: Author dependent
– 100% written by government employee(s) in performance of their job.
– Excluded from protection automatically at the moment of creation and fixation
• Public Domain: Date dependent based on expiration of Term of Protection or failure to comply with formalities.
• GEOGRAPHIC COVERAGE
• Government works: Not copyrighted in the U.S.
– Under Berne, foreign copyrights may apply; i.e., Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, etc.
• Public Domain: Not copyrighted world-wide.
• NOTICE AND ATTRIBUTION
• Government works: Requirement.
– 17 USC Sec 403 Notice of copyright: Publications incorporating United States Government works.
– Section 108 of Pub. L. 94-553 Compliance with Predecessor Notice Provisions, Copies Distributed After Dec 31 1977. Copies of works published before March 1, 1989, that consist primarily of one or more works of the U. S. Government should have a notice and the identifying statement.
• Public Domain: No Requirement
– Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., 539 U.S.23 (2003). “Once a copyrighted work (or, for that matter, a patented invention) passes into the public domain, anyone in the public may do anything they want with the work, with or without attribution to the author.”
• SCOPE
• Government works: May contain material subject to copyright protection.
• Public Domain: The whole and all its parts are not subject to copyright protection
Discussion of change.gov @ lessig.org
There's a good discussion of change.gov and its cc license over on lessig's blog. It seems that the crux of the matter is, is change.gov a US govt site? It seems to me that that is the case (GSA has statutory power to set up the site, it's on a Federal govt server and has a .gov domain etc). Since that's the case, then, as I've stated before, the site should be in the public domain. But others on that comment thread make good cases for its *not* being PD. I'm just glad that people are thinking and are engaged enough to join in the discussion about government information.
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