My Research Participants' Misunderstanding Was Also Obama's?

One area of clear misunderstanding that arose in my copyright study, was that professional writers were not fully aware of the government exception to copyright protection. That is, items authored by the US government are not copyright protected, but are in the public domain. It appears that the Obama administration fell prey to this same misunderstanding but has now, thankfully, corrected itself.

http://www.citmedialaw.org/blog/2009/white-house-drops-license-restrictions-photos-flickr-stream-now-public-domain

"When the White House photos first appeared on Flickr in April, Fred Benenson of Creative Commons and others pointed out that the government couldn't grant a CC license on content to which it didn't own the copyright and hypothesized that the administration likely chose a CC Attribution license as the least restrictive option available to it because Flickr "doesn’t allow their photographers to choose Public Domain as an option to release their work to the world." (As Hugh D'Andrade of EFF pointed out, Flickr does have a public domain option (of sorts) on the "Commons" portion of its site, which acts as a repository for certain public photography collections. This "No known copyright restrictions" label, however, is only available to participating institutions like The Library of Congress and The Brooklyn Museum.) "