Australian Bureau of Statistics to use an open license!

December 10th, 2008

In just over a week, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) will release a new version of their website - which will mostly be under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia license. From the announcement:

Creative Commons provides a spectrum of licensing for the use of intellectual property between full copyright and public domain – in essence “some rights reserved”. The ABS is poised to introduce Creative Commons licensing for the majority of its web content.

The relevant Creative Commons logo (which will link to the Attribution 2.5 Australia Licence) will be included at the bottom of every page on the ABS website.

This is a significant change from what you are currently allowed to do with the material. At the moment the copyright statement says:

Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, and those explicitly granted below, all other rights are reserved.

You may display, reproduce and distribute up to 500 cells of data, in unaltered form only (including data contained within passages, tables, diagrams and images from www.abs.gov.au) without seeking formal consent.

Formal consent must be sought from the ABS where the amount of information exceeds 500 cells of data. The ABS reserves the right to set out the terms and conditions of use.

The adoption of the CC-BY license, one of the most liberal open licenses, is fantastic news - and will allow people to distribute, build on and generally do interesting things with Australian statistical data. Hopefully it will help to encourage other government bodies to open up their holdings!

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Posted by Jonathan Gray Filed in External, News, Open Data, Policy

2 Responses to “Australian Bureau of Statistics to use an open license!”

  1. Australian Bureau of Statistics new creative commons license | Web Directions Says:
    December 11th, 2008 at 2:33 am

    [...] In what is excellent news (via the Open Knowledge Foundation), and hopefully a model for other government agencies in Australia, the ABS has just announced that their soon to be released site update will be licensed under the liberal Create Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia Licence. [...]

  2. Australian Bureau of Statistics to use an open license! « Open Education News Says:
    December 11th, 2008 at 9:12 pm

    [...] Australian Bureau of Statistics to use an open license! Published December 11, 2008 Uncategorized Tags: open license The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) adopts open license, and launches soon its new version website, which will be licensed mainly under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia. (Thanks to Open Knowledge Foundation blog). Extract: Creative Commons provides a spectrum of licensing for the use of intellectual property between full copyright and public domain – in essence “some rights reserved”. The ABS is poised to introduce Creative Commons licensing for the majority of its web content. [...]

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