Creative Commons Licensing comes to Microsoft Office

Useful Technology news for Microsoft Office users who create documents that they share with others. Microsoft and Creative Commons have just released a new feature for Microsoft Office that makes it really easy to add a Creative Commons copyright notice to your documents. Get the download from here. Note that this doesn't yet work with the Beta of Office 2007.

Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation that allows content creators (i.e. people who create stuff on computers) to share their work while retaining rights over their work. Adding a Creative Commons licence is like adding a standard copyright notice but allows you to add more granular rights than the blanket "Oy, don't re-use my stuff, ever!" (i.e. all rights reserved) protection given under conventional copyright laws. A Creative Commons licence is 'useful technology' because you sometimes actually want people to be able to re-use your work but don't want to sign over all rights.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 England & Wales License.