All posts in the topic Victorian Government and CC (Short link)

Feb 05 14:29 NZDT

Here is some great news posted by Jessica Coates from CC Australia on several
discussion lists. Please see below.

- Jane

Hi all

Anyone interested in copyright might have seen the two big Australian court
cases that are getting a lot of airtime at the moment – one stating that the
iiNet ISP isn’t liable for its users bittorrenting, and the other saying that
Men at Work are liable for using part of “Kookaburra sits in the Old Gum Tree”
in “I Come from the Land Downunder”.

But because of this you might have missed another big Australian free culture
announcement - the Victorian Government has become 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.