Creative Commons Pilot October 2007

Creative Commons at Geoscience Australia

Jeff Kingwell

Head, Project Management Office

Information Services Branch

Geoscience Australia

Jeff.kingwell@ga.gov.au

Creative Commons Pilot October 2007

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

Creative Commons Pilot October 2007

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.

Creative Commons Pilot October 2007

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

Creative Commons Pilot October 2007

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.

Creative Commons Pilot October 2007

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

Creative Commons Pilot October 2007

Creative Commons approach 4

Search facility on

Google, Mozilla

Interface with MS- Can watermark

with correct CC licence logo

Creative Commons Pilot October 2007

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

Creative Commons Pilot October 2007

External factors

• Endorsement in principle of CCL by Commonwealth Spatial Data Management group

• Cutler/Innovation Inquiry recommendation 7.8

Creative Commons Pilot October 2007