UPDATE: 12/3/08 Change.gov has changed their copyright statement to a Creative Commons attribution license. Read more about it here at FGI.

There is discussion going on at the FGI website about the copyright status of the President-elect's website, Change.gov, as well as the vanishing contents of the website, among other concerns. We at FGI created a standard letter for you to use (see below) if you wish to contact Change.gov and let them know your concerns.

You can email the change.gov website by going to their Contact page at: http://www.change.gov/page/s/contact

Oh, and Daniel Cornwall created a Facebook group on this issue too. Join and spread the word!

Hello,

I strongly urge you to change the copyright statement on your site to clearly state that all information on the site is in the public domain. According to Copyright Law 17 U.S.C. § 105, "Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government." Since the site is in the .gov domain, people expect the material on the site to have been produced by government employees and thus as being in the public domain.

There has been much discussion over this matter at the Free Government Information website, which you can read about here: http://freegovinfo.info/taxonomy/term/876.

Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

Sincerely,
Rebecca Blakeley
Government Documents Librarian