At the end of March the European Commission (EC) has announced it is adopting the Creative Commons By Attribution license as its standard license.
The CC-BY license will be used for videos and photos, studies published in peer-reviewed journals, data and visualisations on the EU open data portal and documents published on EU websites.
Re-use of EC material has been possible since 2006 (and rephrased in 2011), but in practice it wasn’t always clear to potential re-users what was allowed and what wasn’t.
While re-use and attribution is part of the EC’s copyright notice, it is likely re-users are discouraged by the copyright claim above it, and missing the permissions underneath it:
Current default copyright notice on EC websites, to be exchanged for a CC-BY license
In contrast adding the Creative Commons By Attribution license sends a clear message about permissions that are granted up-front without the need for a re-user to seek consent: any re-use is permitted, including commercial re-use, provided the EC is attributed as its source, and provided re-use forms or alterations don’t suggest they are endorsed by or coming from the EC.
The clarity that a Creative Commons license provides
(full disclosure: I am a board member of Open Nederland, the Dutch Creative Commons chapter)