I noted with interest this news item Microsoft, Lessig Launch New Creative Commons Copyright Tool posted relatively recently to the AMI communities site, and attempted an install.

Not a particlarly quick or simple task in the end. Here was my experince.

To download the tool you must visit the Microsoft Download Center
Office Add-in: Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office

One very important item to note, you must have Microsoft .Net Framework 1.1 installed on your machine first.
To get it there are two further downloads you must make
1) Microsof .NET Framework Version 1.1 Redistributable Package
2) Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 Service Pack 1

Although on reflection you don’t specifically need the Service Pack 1, it’s a nice to have.

After installing all three items (Creative Commons add-in, .Net 1.1 + SP1) you do see the Creative Commons tool item in the “File” menu, as shown in the image below.

This is a picture of the Creative Commons tool once installed into Word 2003.

Also just to say, I had MS .Net 2.0 installed already on my machine, and although the install of the Creative commons tool went fine, the Creative commons menu item did not appear in the File Menu.

I’ve assigned a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License to one document I have recently created and distributed, and while I was doing this, I noted that wherever I had placed the input cursor on the word document, before I clicked on the Creative Commons menu item, that’s exactly where the CC image and license text was entered in the document.
I must admit I still need sometime to play around with this.

One final thought, brought me towards the OpenOffice suite and I wondered if it had a similar add-in. Well I found that it is not in place right now, but the requirements for it are being discussed on the Creative Commons wiki page OpenOfficeOrg_Addin and also over at the Open Office site there are 2 open issues against this item
1) Equivalent of Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office (Opened June 2006)
2) Marking documents with Creative Commons license metadata (Opened May 2004)

If OpenOffice is something you use day to day then this is an addition that you can vote for now, at the link provided in 1).