Australia claims a 1st!

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Posted by ChrisCorbin on 18 May 2010

Canberra: 11 May 2010

The Australian Government published on the 1 May 2010 the Budget statement for 2010-11 and associated reports and data. All the reports have been published under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia licence.

A number of articles and comments have been published about the Australian Government use of Creative Commons in this particular context include:

Show us the money! Oz Budget under CC

The article states:

“The entire budget has been released under a Creative Commons Attribution licence. This means the material it contains - the deficit strategy, the fiscal aggregates, the government's responses to the economic crisis - is all available for free reuse, by anyone, for any purpose, as long as the source is attributed.

A single document, even one that's 350 pages long, may not seem like that big a deal compared to some of the other open government initiatives over the last few years - like the release of the Australian Bureau of Statistic's entire store of census data under CC. But as a public endorsement of CC as the licence of choice for the Australian Federal Government, it's huge.

Following the strong support for open access in the government's response to the Gov 2.0 report last week, this is a great show of the government putting its money where its mouth is (sorry, I couldn't resist). In fact, the last week has seen the release of three major Federal Government reports - the Budget, the Gov 2.0 response and the NBN Implementation Study - all under CC licences. This seems to be a great indicator that the government really means what it says - open access is going to be the default position for the Australian Federal Government from now on.

Bring on the remixes, mashups and YouTube tributes!”

Budget 2010: Creatively common budget should have used Twitter

The article states:

“If it weren’t for Twitter chatter keeping everyone awake, one interesting facet of the whole shebang could have been entirely missed – the fact the Budget was, for the first time ever, released under a Creative Commons license.

The man heading up the Government 2.0 Taskforce, Dr Nicholas Gruen, was joined by a number of others in tweeting what is, in our view, a welcome development.

One of the key recommendations of the Taskforce, accepted in principle by the Government recently, was that public sector information be more easily accessible and searchable, while being released under a Creative Commons BY standard license.”

Australian Government releases historic budget - under a Creative Commons copyright license

The article states:

“What is different? For the first time in history the Australian Government has released major parts of the Federal Budget under a Creative Commons (CC BY) copyright license. This means that the public has the right, without first asking permission via the Attorney-General's office, to copy, mash-up, reuse and publicly republish data from appropriately licensed parts of the budget. They are legally entitled to use this material, provided they attribute the source, to create new and innovative works and insights. This differs from previous Australian Government budgets where the contents were locked up tight under Commonwealth Copyright. While substantial rights were granted for the reuse of material in news reporting and private study, there was no right to otherwise mash-up or republish material publicly without asking permission. Is this only historic from the perspective of past national Australian Governments? I don't think so. To my knowledge this is the first budget released by any government in Australian at any level under a license permitting reuse in this fashion - federal, state or local. That's a lot of governments over more than 200 years. Is this only historic from an Australian perspective? Internationally this may be even more remarkable. While copyright provisions vary around the world, Australia well be the first nation in the world to publish a national government budget under Creative Commons licensing. That make the 2010-2011 Australian Government budget a truly historic budget.”