Peter Brantley points out what’s now at http://www.whitehouse.gov/copyright/:
Pursuant to federal law, government-produced materials appearing on this site are not copyright protected. The United States Government may receive and hold copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.
Except where otherwise noted, third-party content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Visitors to this website agree to grant a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to the rest of the world for their submissions to Whitehouse.gov under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Congratulations to Creative Commons: change may yet come for copyright.
This makes an important statement, if it does seem at odds with President Obama appointing RIAA lawyers to top posts in the Justice Department.
Great news, there have already been some fantastic changes with regards to online openness since the new administration came in. The robots.txt for the whitehouse.gov site used to contain a list of 2400 pages which were blocked to search engine spiders, now the site is entirely spiderable. It’s a small change that only tech geeks will notice but it means a hell of a lot.