Laws have always struggled to keep up with society, however rarely in such a vivid and public way as in Wednesday’s arrest of Sydney Morning Herald journalist, Ben Grubb, and the confiscation of his iPad. The incident, well reported in the SMH, occurred when Queensland Police responded to a complaint regarding a photo hacked from…
There’s lots of interesting debates going on about ownership at the moment. Are the products and content you buy and enjoy owned by you? Do you have the right to switch formats, modify hardware, install software or make a personal copy? Sony has been fighting for years to prevent customers from modding their Playstations, arguing…
Yesterday was a historic day for Australian intellectual property rights. Ann Steward, the Australian Government CIO, announced that the Australian Attorney-General’s Department had released an amended Statement of Intellectual Property Principles for Australian Government Agencies. The amended version endorsed one of the Gov 2.0 Taskforce’s recommendations – that the default copyright position for public sector…
Last month I gave a presentation to around 100 people at the Department of Innovation regarding the use of social media in Australian government, alongside Todd Wright of Threesides. With permission Innovation have published the presentations and video over at their Innovation Blog to share the seminar with others across the public service. I’d love…
New Zealand’s government has just launched a Creative Commons-based approach for the standardisation of the licensing of government copyright works for re-use. Named the New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing framework (NZGOAL), the approach outlines the licensing government agencies should use when releasing copyright works and non-copyright material for re-use by third parties (preferablt…
Bang the Table has released a fantastic little handbook for online community engagement. Titled 100 Ideas to Help Engage your Community Online the book provides 10 ideas in each of 10 topics. The book has been released under Creative Commons (BY) – allowing organisations to reuse, share and mash it up for their own needs…
Media commentators have called the Australian Government’s budget “austere”, “responsible” and “boring but good”. I call it historic. Why so? Look at the copyright information in Budget Paper 1: BUDGET STRATEGY AND OUTLOOK. Budget Papers 2, 3 and 4 have been released on a similar basis. What is different? For the first time in history…
The UK government has announced that the UK will be phasing out the ‘Click-Use’ online licenses for the reuse of Crown and Parliamentary Copyrights by May this year with a new license modelled on Creative Commons 3.0. A review by the UK Office of Public Sector Information in 2009, reported in an article in CreativeCommons.org,…
There is a trend towards greater openness in the licensing of Australian government data. Queensland’s government a few years ago put in place a framework (GILF) for Creative Commons licensing and Victoria’s government recently committing to using Creative Commons as its default copyright licensing system. Some steps have taken place at a federal level, with…
I’ve been alerted by CloCkWeRX in a comment in my post, Australian Labor Party launches social media website, that the South Australian government has passed a law banning anonymous online comments about the South Australian election. According to the article South Australian Government gags internet debate in News.com.au, The new law, which came into force…
This archive mirrors the original eGov AU blog — Craig’s professional commentary on AI, digital government and technology in public life, running since 2006.
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