Creative Commons comes to Microsoft Office

-- Microsoft and the Creative Commons on Wednesday plan to release a free tool that will let people attach a Creative Commons copyright license to Microsoft Office documents.

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that has written licenses that allow content creators to share information while retaining some rights.

Currently, some Web-based tools let people associate a Creative Commons license with information. But Microsoft is the first vendor to embed a license-selection option inside its applications, said Lawrence Lessig, the founder of the Creative Commons and a Stanford Law School professor.
Creative Commons in Office

"This is important to us because a huge amount of creative work is created inside the Office platform. Having a simple way to add Creative Commons licenses obviously helps us spread those licenses much more broadly," Lessig said.

Once installed, the license-selection software will appear as a menu option in the Microsoft Office application.

It will generate a Creative Commons logo, a short summary of the license chosen, and a hyperlink to the Creative Commons Web site. People can download the software from the Creative Commons Web site or from Microsoft Office Online. --