Just a quick note for all those who attended Beyond the Rights Clearance Culture: New Ways to Think about Copyright and Film, the presentation I gave with Professor Brian Fitzgerald at the Byron Bay Film Festival this week (or anyone else interested) - the slides are now up on Slideshare.

A three hour workshop introducing independent film makers to copyright, Creative Commons and business models for the digital age.

We just found out that the Budd:e e-security education package published by the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy won the Best Children's interactive media and digital content category at 2010 AIMIA Awards.

The Budd:e package, which incorporates activity-based modules for primary and secondary school students was developed by Roar Film. Plus, all materials in the package are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 Australia licence. That includes video footage of ccAustralia's own Elliott Bledsoe.

Here's what the judges had to say about it:

"Address the ever increasing importance of internet awareness and etiquette through a fun, interactive and stimulating way. Targets its audience well and conveys key messages and provides learning in an effect but indirect way."

Congratulations to Roar and to DCBDE on the win, and for releasing the package under CC!

ccAustralia extends our congratulations to T Christian Miller, a senior reporter with Creative Commons-licensed news service ProPublica. Miller was awarded the 2010 Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting. The prize, which is administered by the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, has been running for 21 years and is worth $35 000 (USD) in prize money!

Miller was bestowed the honour for his on-going reporting which called attention to the plight of civilian workers injured in Iraq. The reporting project, "Disposable Army", was planned and edited in a collaboration between ProPublica and the Los Angeles Times and saw LA Times photographer Francine Orr and database editor Doug Smith work collaborative with Miller. Content from the project was published in print (LA Times, The Washington Post), online (LATimes.com, ProPublica, Salon.com) and on television (ABC News).

The reportage, like all content (except photos) on the ProPublica site, are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States licence.

Just a quick heads up that the Victorian government has announced that it will be launching a competition over the next few weeks to encourage people to engage and make use of its government data, with over $100,000 worth of prizes to be won.

The competition echoes Mashup Australia, which invited people to remix data from the CC-licensed data.gov.au site. It saw over 80 new applications over the course of a month - lets see if we can do even better for the Victorian government.

We'll let you know when the competition is officially launched - in the meantime, Mashup Australia veterans, or anyone who missed out last time, now's your chance to get ready.

Parliament of Victoria by Brian Giesen

As mentioned in our previous post, today is a very significant day for free culture in Australia, with the Victorian Government becoming the first Australian government to commit to using Creative Commons as the default licensing system for its public sector information.

The commitment is part of the Government's response to its Economic Development and Infrastructure Committee’s Inquiry into Improving Access to Victorian Public Sector Information and Data, which recommended that the Victorian Government adopt a “hybrid public sector information licensing model comprising Creative Commons and a tailored suite of licences for restricted materials.”

Specifically, the response (which is under CC BY-NC-ND) states at p.8 that:

The Victorian Government endorses the committee’s overarching recommendation that the default position for the management of PSI should be open access. The Victorian Government further commits to the development of a whole-of-government Information Management Framework (IMF) whereby PSI is made available under Creative Commons licensing by default with a tailored suite of licences for restricted materials.

As far as we are aware, this is the strongest commitment to Creative Commons implementation made by any Australian government. While there have been a number of excellent CC-friendly recommendations coming out of recent government inquiries - notably the Government 2.0 and Venturous Australia reports - these are yet to be officially adopted. And while there are some excellent implementation projects - the Victorian Government specifically mentions the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Queensland’s Government Information Licensing Framework - these are still limited to individual agencies.

We'll be very excited to see where the Victorian goes from here.

If you have an interest in copyright chances are that you, like us, have spent much of today getting excited by the two big copyright cases that were just handed down by the Australian courts.

For anyone who missed it, Judge Cowdroy of the Federal Court has handed down a decision that Australia's third biggest ISP, iiNet, is not responsible for authorising copyright infringements undertaken by Bittorrenting clients. The decision is very long, but it is also well written and thorough, and we're impressed with Cowdroy J’s common sense approach, with statements like "There does not appear to be any way to infringe the applicants’ copyright from the mere use of the internet" and "The law recognises no positive obligation on any person to protect the copyright of another."

At the same time Jacobson J, also of the Federal Court, has found that Men at Work are liable for copyright infringement for reusing two lines of Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree in Land Downunder.

But in all this big-name copyright excitement its very easy to miss another important piece of copyright news – the Victorian Government has just committed to using Creative Commons as the default licensing system for all its public sector information. This is the strongest commitment to CC of any Australian government - so strong, in fact, that it deserves its own post.

Definitely a good day to be a free culture advocate in Oz.

Design by Ben Crothers of Catch Media CC BY 2.5

This is a bit belated, as it was released in 22 December – but we thought people would like to hear about the final report of the Government 2.0 Taskforce and its fabulous CC recommendations.

Headed by well know economist Dr Nick Gruen and including representation from the public, private and academic sectors, the Taskforce was launched in June by the Finance Minister, Lindsay Tanner, to advise the Australian government on "increasing the openness of government through making public sector information more widely available to promote transparency, innovation and value adding to government information" and "encouraging online engagement with the aim of drawing in the information, knowledge, perspectives, resources and even, where possible, the active collaboration of anyone wishing to contribute to public life."

Over the last few months it's been everywhere - running competitions, public forums, seemingly endless blog posts.

Now the Taskforce has released its final report - Engage: Getting on with Government 2.0 - and pretty impressive it is too, with an excellent summary of the current state of play for Australian government online - the goods and the bads.

Key findings of the report, which is published by the Finance Department, include:

• Public agencies and public servants should engage more using the tools and capabilities of ‘collaborative web’ or Web 2.0. Forming or join existing online communities of interest around issues of relevance to government policy, service delivery and regulation will help public agencies and their officers become more informed, responsive, innovative and citizen-centric.
• Once public sector information is liberated as a key national asset, possibilities — foreseeable and otherwise — are unlocked through the invention, creativity and hard work of citizens, business and community organisations. Open public sector information is thus an invitation to the public to engage, innovate and create new public value.
• To seize the opportunities of Government 2.0, the existing public service culture of hierarchical control and direction must change sufficiently to encourage and reward engagement. Yet it must at the same time, stay true to enduring public service values of impartiality, propriety and professionalism.

Most importantly from our point of view – the report (which is under a CC BY licence) wholeheartedly endorses Creative Commons Attribution as the default licence for government material. In fact, it contains a page and a half long recommendation (no. 6) which spells out exactly how open content licensing can, and should, be made central to Crown copyright policy.

Just a quick reminder that there's only a few more days to donate to CC's 2009 fundraising campaign.

It's been a hard year financially for everyone, including CC, and unfortunately at this point there's still a fair way to go to our goal of $500,000.

So while we're all winding down 2009, if you've got a bit of change in your pocket from Christmas and the sales, think about using it to support CC's good work in free culture. Anything and everything is appreciated.

Here's a great post by Michael Carroll going over some of the amazing things that CC has achieved in 2009.