Add Creative Commons copyright info to Office docos

By Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 21 June 2006 15:17

Home IT

Microsoft and Creative Commons, a non-profit organisation that offers a variety of copyright licenses for creative works, have teamed up to release a tool that enables Creative Commons licensing information to be added to documents created by Microsoft Office applications.
However while the tool enables authors to express their licensing preferences its does not impose any physical restrictions on the documents to which the licence is applied.

According to Microsoft's website "This add-in enables you to embed a Creative Commons license into a document that you create using the popular applications: Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office PowerPoint, or Microsoft Office Excel. With a Creative Commons license, authors can express their intentions regarding how their works may be used by others."

The tool is available free of charge from http://office.microsoft.com/ At present it is applicable to Office XP and Office 2003 running under Windows 2000; Windows 98; Windows ME; Windows NT; Windows Server 2003; Windows XP.

Users choose from a variety of Creative Commons licenses that enable an author to retain copyright ownership, yet give permission for the work to be copied and distributed with a range of possible restrictions, such as whether or not the work can be used commercially and whether or not modifications can be made to the work.

The full list of licenses available from Creative Commons is available online here. http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/meet-the-licenses. The tool also provides a way for users to dedicate a work to the public domain.

Microsoft and Creative Commons partnered with 3sharp LLC, a Redmond-based independent solution provider to develop and test the copyright licensing tool.