Creative Commons at Geoscience Australia

1. Creative Commons at Geoscience Australia Jeff Kingwell Head, Project Management Office Information Services Branch Geoscience Australia Jeff.kingwell@ga.gov.au

2. Business requirements • Simplify licence regime (currently several dozen in use, many on a one-off basis) to reduce legal costs and administrative overheads • Protect Commonwealth IP, prevent implicit endorsements and reduce liability exposure • Facilitate use, re-use & value adding based on Public Sector Information obtained as part of GA core business • Observe Commonwealth IP Principles, Cost Recovery Guidelines and Spatial Data Access & Pricing policy (SDAP) • Fundamental approach is ready/open access except where special circumstances apply eg • Third party ownership/ownership unclear • National security • Privacy issues

3. Current default licence “OSDM” licence is default. Overseen by the Office of Spatial Data Management (hosted by GA) under the SDAP policy). Represents compromise between market-driven and open access approach of its time (2001). Generally requires registration of user – implicit administrative overhead. “Opt in” approach – datasets nominated on case by case basis, added by OSDM to a Schedule. In principle, implies re Not optimised for machine to machine or machine to client transaction. Not widely recognised outside of geospatial community.

4. Creative Commons Pilot Project 2007-8 Identified CCL as potentially attractive approach • Standard, world-wide, recognised, on-line help • Configured to Australian jurisdiction • Supported through OAK and related projects – possibility of leveraging legal and technical ground work • Facilitates machine to machine transactions • Interfaces/tools for Microsoft, Google, Firefox - improves Discoverability & Interoperability/Interuse • Comparatively simple language, clarifies conditions of use & reuse

5. Creative Commons Pilot Project 2007-8 - outcomes Obtained legal advice on utility of CCL in GA environment Identified representative sample of ~ 20 GA products Applied simple vetting process to select 5-6 highly suitable candidates (including most popular, most voluminous information transactions, & where risk mitigation indicated for current arrangements) Obtained specific legal advice on those candidates Obtained CIO and AGD/Copyright Office endorsement to selectively apply CCL Attribution 2.5 and evaluate after 6 months Currently implementing CCL release for these products.

6. Licences used in GA • ACRES: Satellite/sensor specific licences NOAA, MODIS, ASTER (2), Landsat, ALOS, ERS, …… • OSDM Licence • National Mapping/GEODATA TOPO • GADDS • CRC agreements • Other collaborative agreement eg AMIRA • GNU Public • OGC • Defence Data • No licence • Other licence

7. Creative Commons approach 4 Search facility on Google, Mozilla Interface with MS • Can watermark with correct CC licence logo

8. Digital Geographic Commons Conceptual Model (Licensing Geographic Data and Services, National Research Council, 2004) • Metadata, licence, ownership and disclaimer all embedded in the data (“watermarking”) • On-line tool to assist in generation of metadata • Users can search for, access and download the watermarked datasets • Feedback facility for user/peer assessment

9. External factors • Endorsement in principle of CCL by Commonwealth Spatial Data Management group • Cutler/Innovation Inquiry recommendation 7.8