Creative Commons is a great little organization that gives you a way to control the rights to your work in a simple way, appropriate to the Internet and without the formal hassles of copyright.
Creative Commons is a great little organization that gives you a way to control the rights to your work in a simple way, appropriate to the Internet and without the formal hassles of copyright.
The Creative Commons website has the details and explanation of their licenses for Attribution, Non-commercial, No Derivative Works and Share Alike etc.
Microsoft has jumped on this particular bandwagon by releasing a third-party tool which makes it easier to append the correct license type to your Word, Excel or Powerpoint document.
After you’ve installed the tool you’ll find a ‘Creative Commons’ item in the File menu, that starts a wizard that lets you choose the type of license, jurisdiction etc. Once you’re done, the wizard will insert the correct text, link and graphic for the license. In addition some custom fields are added (under File | Properties | Custom) about the type of license.
There’s nothing very special about the tool, for it doesn’t add any additional protections or limits on access to your documents. You could go to the Creative Commons site and do the same thing yourself in a minute or so. But it does bring the Creative Commons concept to a wider audience and that can only be a good thing.
Cynics might be dubious about Microsoft, of all companies, supporting something that encourages open source projects such a GNU-GPL.
And you have to smile at an organization that supplies three versions of some of their licenses – the human version, a machine readable version and a lawyer compatible version!
The tool is available from this Microsoft site and is 7.6MB. It’s only compatible with Office 2003 and Office XP. In all our tests a re-boot was required after installation.
You also should check out CreativeCommons.org to understand the various types of license that are available.
