Parliament of Victoria by Brian Giesen

As mentioned in our previous post, today is a very significant day for free culture in Australia, with the Victorian Government becoming the first Australian government to commit to using Creative Commons as the default licensing system for its public sector information.

The commitment is part of the Government's response to its Economic Development and Infrastructure Committee’s Inquiry into Improving Access to Victorian Public Sector Information and Data, which recommended that the Victorian Government adopt a “hybrid public sector information licensing model comprising Creative Commons and a tailored suite of licences for restricted materials.”

Specifically, the response (which is under CC BY-NC-ND) states at p.8 that:

The Victorian Government endorses the committee’s overarching recommendation that the default position for the management of PSI should be open access. The Victorian Government further commits to the development of a whole-of-government Information Management Framework (IMF) whereby PSI is made available under Creative Commons licensing by default with a tailored suite of licences for restricted materials.

As far as we are aware, this is the strongest commitment to Creative Commons implementation made by any Australian government. While there have been a number of excellent CC-friendly recommendations coming out of recent government inquiries - notably the Government 2.0 and Venturous Australia reports - these are yet to be officially adopted. And while there are some excellent implementation projects - the Victorian Government specifically mentions the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Queensland’s Government Information Licensing Framework - these are still limited to individual agencies.

We'll be very excited to see where the Victorian goes from here.

If you have an interest in copyright chances are that you, like us, have spent much of today getting excited by the two big copyright cases that were just handed down by the Australian courts.

For anyone who missed it, Judge Cowdroy of the Federal Court has handed down a decision that Australia's third biggest ISP, iiNet, is not responsible for authorising copyright infringements undertaken by Bittorrenting clients. The decision is very long, but it is also well written and thorough, and we're impressed with Cowdroy J’s common sense approach, with statements like "There does not appear to be any way to infringe the applicants’ copyright from the mere use of the internet" and "The law recognises no positive obligation on any person to protect the copyright of another."

At the same time Jacobson J, also of the Federal Court, has found that Men at Work are liable for copyright infringement for reusing two lines of Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree in Land Downunder.

But in all this big-name copyright excitement its very easy to miss another important piece of copyright news – the Victorian Government has just committed to using Creative Commons as the default licensing system for all its public sector information. This is the strongest commitment to CC of any Australian government - so strong, in fact, that it deserves its own post.

Definitely a good day to be a free culture advocate in Oz.

Design by Ben Crothers of Catch Media CC BY 2.5

This is a bit belated, as it was released in 22 December – but we thought people would like to hear about the final report of the Government 2.0 Taskforce and its fabulous CC recommendations.

Headed by well know economist Dr Nick Gruen and including representation from the public, private and academic sectors, the Taskforce was launched in June by the Finance Minister, Lindsay Tanner, to advise the Australian government on "increasing the openness of government through making public sector information more widely available to promote transparency, innovation and value adding to government information" and "encouraging online engagement with the aim of drawing in the information, knowledge, perspectives, resources and even, where possible, the active collaboration of anyone wishing to contribute to public life."

Over the last few months it's been everywhere - running competitions, public forums, seemingly endless blog posts.

Now the Taskforce has released its final report - Engage: Getting on with Government 2.0 - and pretty impressive it is too, with an excellent summary of the current state of play for Australian government online - the goods and the bads.

Key findings of the report, which is published by the Finance Department, include:

• Public agencies and public servants should engage more using the tools and capabilities of ‘collaborative web’ or Web 2.0. Forming or join existing online communities of interest around issues of relevance to government policy, service delivery and regulation will help public agencies and their officers become more informed, responsive, innovative and citizen-centric.
• Once public sector information is liberated as a key national asset, possibilities — foreseeable and otherwise — are unlocked through the invention, creativity and hard work of citizens, business and community organisations. Open public sector information is thus an invitation to the public to engage, innovate and create new public value.
• To seize the opportunities of Government 2.0, the existing public service culture of hierarchical control and direction must change sufficiently to encourage and reward engagement. Yet it must at the same time, stay true to enduring public service values of impartiality, propriety and professionalism.

Most importantly from our point of view – the report (which is under a CC BY licence) wholeheartedly endorses Creative Commons Attribution as the default licence for government material. In fact, it contains a page and a half long recommendation (no. 6) which spells out exactly how open content licensing can, and should, be made central to Crown copyright policy.

Just a quick reminder that there's only a few more days to donate to CC's 2009 fundraising campaign.

It's been a hard year financially for everyone, including CC, and unfortunately at this point there's still a fair way to go to our goal of $500,000.

So while we're all winding down 2009, if you've got a bit of change in your pocket from Christmas and the sales, think about using it to support CC's good work in free culture. Anything and everything is appreciated.

Here's a great post by Michael Carroll going over some of the amazing things that CC has achieved in 2009.

And we reach another milestone.

It's been a big year this year, with CC really hitting the mainstream.

We've had big adopters internationally - Obama, Wikipedia, Yoko Ono, Al Jazeera - and locally - the ABC, Mash Up Australia, Powerhouse Museum, Geoscience Australia (and many more).

We had our first national competition, published an anthology of remixable literature, and had a visit from CC Founder Lawrence Lessig.

Best of all, we made lots of new friends - even zombies love CC!

So as this year closes and we head into our 8th, we wish everyone a very open Christmas, and look forward to a new decade built on sharing.

Merry Christmas to all my Flickr friends by aussiegal

Shattuck_23096-1, Uluru, NT by SouthernAnts

We know we've been publishing a lot about licensing of government documents and data of late, but there really has been so much happening that we just can't resist. This week's story is one we've actually been meaning to post about for a while.

As of late November Geoscience Australia has officially adopted Creative Commons Attribution as the default licence for its website. This means more than 18 877 products available through the website, including 3690 datasets, are now free to be reused, repurposed and remixed, including for commercial purposes - as long as you attribute Geoscience Australia as the original source, of course.

I'm just guessing, but I wouldn't be surprised if this put Geoscience Austalia up with Australian Bureau of Statistics as the two largest sources of Creative Commons material in Australia.

As Chief Information Officer, Stuart Girvan, says in the press release:

Our agency is custodian of a vast range of valuable geological and spatial datasets that are used by the public sector and private sector industries in the exploitation of resources, management of the environment, safety of critical infrastructure and the resultant well-being of all Australians. The Creative Commons licence has created a more efficient process for them to access this valuable information.

With open map applications in every phone and climate change firmly at the top of political and popular debates, it's more and more important that Australians have access to reliable, reuseable information about their land and landscape. Geoscience Australia is to be congratulated for ensuring that this information is available, for free, for everyone to use for the good of the country.

Did you know that someone has a patent (US Patent 5443036) over using a laser pointer to exercise a cat? Serious. Likewise, The Walt Disney Company has a patent (US Patent 5392735) on a device for talking to dolphins (and perhaps even "whales and porpoises" too)? With approximately 1 million patents being applied for across the world each year the task of examiners especially in assessing new technologies has become increasingly difficult.

A new service in Australia will help sort the patent chaff. Starting this morning, the newly-launched Peer-To-Patent Australia project is designed to improve the process and the quality of issued patents by helping to assess whether an invention is new and inventive. How? With your help!

And another one for those interested in government communications policy - on Thursday the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy is running the Realising Our Broadband Future forum at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

With an opening by - wait for it - the Prime Minister, the Hon Kevin Rudd, and featured keynote speakers including Senator the Hon. Stephen Conroy Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, well known open access advocate Senator Kate Lundy and CEO of the NBN Co. Mike Quigley, the day certainly looks set to be one of the keystone public consultation events in the lead up to the National Broadband Network.

From the website:

The National Broadband Network (NBN) will turbo-charge our digital economy and enable Australia to become a global leader in using the online world - the world of the 21st century. It will make possible new ways of delivering all essential services.

We need to start planning now for this new world to ensure we maximise the opportunities that the National Broadband Network will provide.

The Government is hosting the Realising Our Broadband Future forum to map the applications and business models that will thrive in Australia's high speed broadband future.

The UNSW forum is invitation only - but to make sure everyone can get involved there are a number of options for remote participation, from a live stream to an idea wiki to Twitter hashtag. They're also inviting people to suggest ideas or topics in advance of the forum, based around the five streams of:

• Smart Infrastructure
• e-Business.
• Digital Education
• e-Health
• e-Communities

Furthermore, there are a couple of complimentary forums popping up around the country, combining live streams of the main keynotes with local speakers and discussion forums. For instance, our sister research project, auPSI, will be hosting an event at QUT in Brisbane. A similar forum is being held at Parramatta.

So take advantage of the options to participate in shaping this important part of Australia's development, while you still have the ability to have your say.