Right Head on the Wrong Body

The copyright statement on the website for the Obama-Biden transition team, Change.gov, seems to send out a mixed message. On the one hand it prominently displays the icons that show its use of Creative Commons licenses that offer an alternative to traditional copyright regimes and the strict principles around ownership of intellectual property made into law by the DMCA. Yet it also contains the following DMCA notice:

The Obama-Biden Transition Project respects the intellectual property of others, and we ask users of our Web sites to do the same. In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and other applicable law, we have adopted a policy of terminating, in appropriate circumstances and at our sole discretion, subscribers or account holders who are deemed to be repeat infringers. We may also at our sole discretion limit access to our Web site and/or terminate the accounts of any users who infringe any intellectual property rights of others, whether or not there is any repeat infringement.

There is some irony to this insistence on the letter of the law, given the fact that remix videos like "Vote Different" and "Yes We Can" were important for getting attention to the Obama candidacy.