International Law

Parliament House by Ryan Wick CC BY 2.0

Hopefully most of you have seen the official launch of the Australian v3.0 licences earlier today.

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 Australian licence. This is the website which houses all the most important documents of the Australian Federal Government ? including all bills, committee reports and, most importantly, the Hansard transcript of Parliamentary Sittings ? so this is a major move for the 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, the Federal Government has released the Budget, the NBN implementation study and the Gov 2.0 response itself all under CC licences. This latest announcement solidifies the government's commitment to openness and transparency, 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.

via creativecommons.org.au