Interesting comment from Lawrence Lessig concerning the recently released Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office. Lawrence reports surprise at people's surprise that Microsoft and CC would work together and says

"Microsoft has been on the right side of a number of important issues — spectrum, net neutrality, identity — and I’m very glad they’re on the right side of this issue too."

For those that haven't seen it yet, this add-in enables a Creative Commons license to be embedded into a Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office PowerPoint, or Microsoft Office Excel document. With a Creative Commons license, authors can express their intentions regarding how their works may be used by others.

When installed the add-in adds a Creative Commons entry to the file menu.

Which offers a choice of 3 licence types.

The tool allows users to express approximately eight sets of rights, including a “no rights reserved” license that opens the content to the public domain in its entirety, so that an author has a more complete range of rights for expressing  his or her intentions regarding the use of the original work.  Learn more about Creative Commons or the licence choices.

The add-in downloads the Creative Commons license you designate from the Creative Commons Web site and inserts it directly into your creative work. Creative Commons supports a number of languages.

Here's the embedded licence ...

and if you re-select the Creative Commons option again you are duly alerted to the existing licence ...

As Lawrence goes on to say

"Giving creators the tools to mark their creativity with the freedoms they intend it to carry is a fantastically good thing to do.

“But it’s just for the Windows platform, isn’t it?” True enough. Now we need some enterprising sort to make a plug-in for Office on the Mac, as well as Garageband, OpenOffice, and many others. Let the competition begin."

[Update 26/6] Jason Matusow has a post with tons of links here.