I am not really a lawyer, so I don't know for certain how to effectively do this or how fine-grained it has to be. I can float some possibilities, but someone more knowledgeable would have to assess them.
There is a page on the python website about the license [1]. As far as I can tell this page is duplicated in the "LICENSE" file in the root of the Python sources (or there is something very similar). It may be possible to simply put some text there saying that all code present in the documentation is under the CC0 license (probably with the text of the license somewhere). This would be a good thing to do, in my opinion, no matter what, but whether it is sufficient I don't know. If that is sufficient, I think that would be the ideal solution.
Perhaps text like: "The Python __ver__ software and documentation is available under the [Python-2.0 license]. However, all code found in the documentation has been released into the public domain or, in jurisdictions where that is not allowed, is available under the [Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license]." ([] indicate links to the license text) I think this would probably be best under the "Terms and conditions" section, but before actual text of the license.
If that isn't sufficient, it may be possible to also put that at the bottom of all the documentation pages, where the copyright text already is. I assume the copyright text is some sort of automatically-added footer, so hopefully this would be something that could be done once. Perhaps something like "Code found on this page is under the [CC0 license]". There would need to be care to make sure that this is applied to the code in the documentation, rather than the html and/or javascript code underlying the web page. I don't know if my text does that or not.
If even that isn't sufficient, there may be some way to add the CC0 icon [3] to every piece of code in the documentation automatically, but I don't know enough about how the code is generated to say, and I would hope that wouldn't be necessary.
Another possibility would be to amend the Python license itself. Currently the license is known as the Python-2.0 license [4]. This would probably be the Python-2.1 license. However, not being a lawyer I would not presume to touch the license text.
OK, let's see if we can do CC0. Todd, do you want to read through the link Steven gave and find out how we should apply this, either to just the itertools examples, or possibly to all examples in the docs?
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