[open-government] Creative Commons and Government Data in Australia

Sat Jul 9 10:34:10 UTC 2011

To avoid confusion, it is important to understand that the recently-announced AusGOAL is *not* Creative Commons.  Like the original GILF we developed in a Queensland Government-QUT project from 2005, AusGOAL is a licensing framework, part of which (the Restrictive Licence) has the potential to be very restrictive indeed.  GILF was based on all 6 Creative Commons licences, as well as licences created using the Restrictive Licence template and model clauses.  AusGOAL, similarly, makes reference to all 6 Creative Commons licences, the BSD open source software licence and  the Restrictive Licence template. 
By the time the Government 2.0 Taskforce was convened in 2009, policy developments (including the OECD recommendations on access to and reuse of PSI, adopted at the OECD Seoul Ministerial Conference in June 2008) had shifted markedly in favour of open access and reuse.  So, when the Government 2.0 Taskforce published its report, "Engage: Getting on with Government 2.0", in December 2009, it recommended (rec 6.1) that "by default PSI should be: free, based on open standards, easily discoverable, understandable, machine-readable, and freely reusable and transformable" and (rec. 6.3) that "consistent with the need for free and open reuse and adaptation, PSI released should be licensed under the CC BY standard as the default".
The "Engage" report is here:  http://bit.ly/5nkbZd 
The Gov 2.0 Taskforce's recommendation that CC BY should be the default licence for government copyright material was accepted by the federal government and is now reflected in the Attorney General's "Statement of IP Principles for Australian Government Agencies" (2010) (see http://bit.ly/axfBr0)  and the Australian Information Commissioner's Principles on open PSI (2011) (see http://bit.ly/qIPapZ).  For example, Principle 6 of the Information Commissioner's Principles on open PSI states that "the default condition should be the CC BY standard, as recommended in the IP Principles for Australian Government Agencies."  As the Information Commissioner explains (see http://bit.ly/isyccc), AusGOAL "is a framework that will assist agencies in identifying the correct licence to use if the CC BY licence is not appropriate".  In other words, AusGOAL comes into play where a more restrictive licence than the default CC BY licence is used, and is intended to provide guidance as to how and when restrictions on access and reuse should apply.   
Through the roll out of Creative Commons licences across numerous government agencies (at all levels of government in Australia), as well as through project such as OAK Law (Open Access to Knowledge - Law) and the Legal Framework for eResearch we now have a depth of knowledge about CC licences and their application to public sector and publicly-funded copyright materials.   If you would like further information, or would like to relate your experience in using CC licences in the public sector, please contact me.
Anne
Professor Anne Fitzgerald
QUT Law Faculty
am.fitzgerald at qut.edu.au