Cc-au mailing list

[Jessica Coates <j2.coates AT qut.edu.au>]

Hopefully most of you have seen the official launch of the Australian v3.0 
licences earlier today (http://creativecommons.org.au/version3).

We’re very pleased to announce that the licences, only a few hours old, 
already have their first significant adopter. A couple of weeks ago the 
Australian Parliament officially announced, via the Australian Library and 
Information Association's mailing list, that it will be porting its central 
http://www.aph.gov.au website across to a Creative Commons v3.0 BY-NC-ND 
licence. This is the website which houses all the most important documents of 
Australian Fedreal Government – including all bills, committee reports and, 
most importantly, the Hansard transcript of Parliamentary Sittings – so this 
is a major move for Australian government.

>From the Australian Parliament announcement:

The Parliament of Australia is committed to open access to the resources it 
publishes to support a vibrant democracy. Recognising the important of 
ensuring access to its resources published on the website the parliament has 
approved publication under a Creative Commons 3.0 
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license 
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/au/) instead of copyright 
protection.  Full implementation will occur when the new web site is released 
in late 2010. Until then a notice appears on the copyright page advising of 
this change.
...
We are enormously excited at this step to open up parliamentary information.


Since its endorsement of open access as its preferred default in its response 
to the Gov 2.0 Report last month 
(http://www.creativecommons.org.au/node/295), the Federal Government has 
released the Budget, the NBN implementation study and the Gov2.0 response 
itself all under CC licences (http://www.creativecommons.org.au/node/297). 
This latest announcement solidifies the Australian government commitment to 
openness and transparenct and means that the entire public record of our 
government will now be available for non-commercial reuse by anyone, without 
the need for additional permissions.