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Creative Commons Add-In for Office Released

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the newer-friendlier-borg dept.

Ctrl+Alt+De1337 writes "Creative Commons has announced the release of an add-in to Microsoft Office that allows the easy addition of a CC license to files created with Word, PowerPoint, or Excel. It was co-developed by Microsoft and Creative Commons and only works in Office XP and Office 2003. It can be downloaded from Microsoft's download center after a validation check, and CNet has a screenshot available of the tool."

14 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. Why do you need an add-in? by ThinkingInBinary · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why would you want a "Creative Commons tool" for Office? Wouldn't it just be easier to add a page after the title page, like the copyright page, but instead explaining the license of the document? Why do you need a program to do it for you?

    What would be far more useful would be a way to tag Creative Commons documents in web pages, and then if some search engine (Google? please?) would explicitly label Creative Commons results as such, and encourage people to listen to, view, combine, mash up (shudder), and otherwise use them.

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    1. Re:Why do you need an add-in? by ReverendLoki · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I for one can see how this would be useful. You see, there isn't one set of terms and conditions, but rather there's a whole range of possible conditions applicable under Creative Commons licensing.

      What this looks like is pretty much a wizard that asks you how you would like to allow your work to be used, and then generates the CC license for those conditions. Although a nice add on, it really doesn't look all that complicated. I'm hoping it isn't long until someone makes a good wizard for OpenOffice.org as well.

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  2. Why should they need to? by Manip · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There is something very wrong with our copyright system when people have to attach a licence to all media they create in order for others to use it... Perhaps I should start wearing a badge that reads "Your eyes and ears have permission to consume my copyright material (e.g. My voice, and face."

    Why isn't media created free/public domain unless its creator wants it protected? ... ?

    1. Re:Why should they need to? by cnettel · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Well, if you don't ever intend to use your rights, it's practically in the public domain. Adding a license makes it obvious, you can't go back later and say "hey, I DO want full rights to this". If, on the other hand, everything was free that wasn't explicitly tagged, I think we would run into even more draconian assertions of all material that should be protected: imagine that you see some rather long excerpt where the copyright note is NOT present, and imagine if that meant a practical carte blanche to copy it?

    2. Re:Why should they need to? by QuantumG · · Score: 3, Insightful

      No. You are wrong. All rights are reserved by default. If I create a work that can be covered by copyright, it is covered by copyright, and you have no rights under the law to copy the work without my express written permission (excluding fair use). This is one of the many ways copyright law is draconian.

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    3. Re:Why should they need to? by Planesdragon · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Why isn't media created free/public domain unless its creator wants it protected? ... ?

      We tried that. Publishing companies (think of RIAA, but without the need for good PR) simply said that the author didn't delcare a copyright, and made millions without giving a dime to said author until they were taken to court.

      It's trivial to make something public domain. CC makes it a bit more complicated, but they do have a theoretical way to authenticate what is and is not allowed, which nicely removes the only problem with public domain -- it can be hard to verify.

  3. Re:it is a crock off shit by nuzak · · Score: 5, Insightful

    God forbid that Microsoft should encourage anyone to use their own product or anything. Such a shame that no one is able to write CC-covered material with any other product anymore, thanks to the exclusive arrangement that CC no doubt made with Microsoft.

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  4. After Validation? by dustwun · · Score: 2, Insightful

    What's this "after validation" business? Doesn't this seem slightly hypocritical when compared to Creative Commons? The xml in the document has 'MICROSOFT" all over the place, so it's not like you can say you didn't make it in an office product.

  5. Why? And what about OpenOffice? by rafadev · · Score: 2, Insightful
    I really don't understand why M$ would want to develop such a tool. I guess they want OTHER people to share stuff, NOT them, of course. Its reasonable that the Creative Commons staff would want it to make it easier for people to creativcommonize their documents, but really, supporting a plugin for Office XP and 2003 doesn't actually cope much with the open philosophy. At least they don't ask you to validate your windows version, that would be really funny. I guess it would have been more reasonable if they did such a tool for OpenOffice, or another open office suite, I think that it would be much more usefull than making one such "uncompatible"...

    Quoting from the M$ download site:
    Microsoft Office productivity applications are the most widely used personal productivity applications in the world, and Microsoft's goal is to enhance the user's experience with those applications. Empowering Microsoft Office users to express their intentions through Creative Commons licenses is another way Microsoft enables users around the world to exercise their creative freedom while being clear about the rights granted to users of a creative work. In the past, it has not always been easy or obvious to understand the intentions of some authors or artists regarding distribution or use of their intellectual creations.
    It seems to me that that is the biggest load of lies I've ever heard. It's nearly as missleading as the healthy McDonald's trash. "Microsoft enables users around the world to exercise their creative freedom" Creative freedom?, Microsoft? I guess those terms don't really cope. I think that before releasing such a tool they should try applying some creative freedom themselves.
    1. Re:Why? And what about OpenOffice? by bit01 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      No, he's saying M$ because it's appropriate. Helps remind people that M$ is still taxing the world $40,000,000,000+ per year for about a dozen programs mostly written more than a decade a go with the most difficult bit, the device drivers, largely written by third parties.

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  6. Re:What's the point by Keeper · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What's the point of posting on a website not under your control?

  7. Re:it is a crock off shit by cnettel · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Of course MS loves to see massive use of their formats. Can we really blame them for that?

    On the other hand, one point with (some of) the CC licenses is continued editing; although another point is to maintain the distinction against public domain with "full edit/no attribution" rights. That is, a PDF version might not technically hinder you from integrating a CC work into your own document, but if you use MS Office (or even OO.org), a MS Office document might mean an easier way to do it. This means that we can't say that distribution in ONLY a highly presentation-centric format like PDF would be a good thing, despite it being open.

    Lots of people use MS Office and won't convert to anything else if this "licensing wizard" download was missing. It might encourage a few to license works in a clear and less restrictive manner. I see nothing wrong in that.

  8. Re:What's the point by Trevahaha · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Because you're licensing the content not the format it's presented in. People generally copyright the text on a website or inside a book, not that the book was printed on white paper using a serif font or that your website is running on Apache or IIS.

  9. Please don't use this! by zsau · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Please don't use this plugin if you are releasing your content under a free Creative Commons licence. No document is free if it's encoded in one of Microsoft's proprietry formats. You are much better off to use the online Creative Commons licence chooser, and copy the text to a document written in OpenOffice.org, TeX, Gnumeric, HTML or the like yourself. This way, you will know that all your potential audience is able to read the document (even if they have to download some software first), even in ten years time when Microsoft Office XP is no longer supported and the current version makes a hash of old files.

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