Web Stakeholders Push For 'Open Transition' Principles
A coalition of high-tech stakeholders led by Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig, Web browser creator Mozilla, and the Participatory Culture Foundation are urging President-elect Barack Obama's transition team to follow a set of "open transition principles" as they deploy resources to the Internet. The group began discussing the principles last week, just before the Obama team changed the copyright terms on Change.gov from "All Rights Reserved" to a Creative Commons attribution license.
The group welcomed that change, which will allow others to freely share and remix what's posted there provided that reposts are attributed to Change.gov, but in a letter to transition officials suggest two other principles that would assure broader access to resources posted on the Web. (1) No technological barrier so citizens can download transition-related content in a way that makes it simple to share, excerpt, remix, or redistribute. (2) Transition-generated content should not be made publicly available in a way that unfairly benefits one commercial entity over another or commercial entities over noncommercial entities.
"We were all encouraged during the campaign by President-elect Obama’s commitment to open government -- ideals that helped inspire a generation to act. His transition team has now taken an important step to making this commitment real. That step deserves heartfelt praise" the group said. "We offer here these additional principles as a practical way to make tangible the values President-elect Obama has spoken of so powerfully. We believe these values should guide every aspect of his transition, and the new government as well."
Letter signatories include the Electronic Frontier Foundation; Free Press; Students for Free Culture; the Sunlight Foundation; Sun Microsystems Federal; MoveOn.org; Center for Citizen Media; the Internet Archive; American Solutions; Wikipiedia founder Jimmy Wales and others. Read more about the initiative here.
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Presidential Transition
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