Although currently accredited is not available across the full suite of courses, P2PU is working on gaining full accreditation for all its courseware. P2PU offers fantastic programs which are run by passionate and dedicated volunteers who just want to ensure that you are receiving top quality educational service.  One such course that is currently being offered is Copyright 4 Educators which is being faciliated by Delia Browne, friend of ccAustralia and well-known Australian CC and open eduation advocate.  Sign up for courses has already opened. Register before 8 September 2010.

From the P2PU course description:

Credits—Photo: Adaptation (crop and resize) of ‘create environments for learning doodle‘ by Inha Leex Hale, CC BY 2.0 Generic.

It’s been one week since we announced the CC Roadshow 2010, our on-the-road national conference for this year, and already the RSVPs have been streaming in from all over the country (although Melbourne is leading the RSVP tally by miles!). As we start to get a picture of who is coming to each event, we’ve been using this information to help us craft the programs for each of the CC Roadshows.

But before the city programs get to full-up we want to give our community the opportunity to get involved in their local event. We’re looking for as many interesting CC champions in each location as we can. We want to feature the broadest cross-section of the Australian Creative Commons community as we can. So if you are a musician, filmmaker, policy maker, photographer, educator, lecturer, librarian or anyone else for that matter, and you’re using Creative Commons we want to hear from you. Send us an email, post a comment on this blog entry, at reply us on Twitter or post on our Facebook wall with details and we’ll get in touch. Help us make the CC Roadshows your event.

Credits—Image: Screen capture of Australia from OpenStreetMap, CC BY-SA 2.0 Generic. Font: ‘Rawengulk‘ by GLuk, SIL Open Font 1.1. Icons: ‘Remix’, ‘Noncommercial’, ‘Attribution’, ‘Share Alike’, ‘Copy’ and ‘No Derivative Works’ icons by Creative Commons Corporation, CC BY 3.0 Unported.

Jessica played a crucial role with the Creative Commons Australia project over the past four years. Apart from responding to innumerable public inquiries and presenting countless talks on CC, Jessica passionately pursued the uptake of CC licences in the education and GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sectors in Australia. She authored a number of articles and reports about CC, not to mention most of the posts on the blog and spent countless hours coordinating our efforts on the Version 3.0 Australian CC licences.

She came to the project with a keen interest in promoting new models of copyright management and  her commitment did not waiver. Jessica’s contributions to Creative Commons in Australian and internationally have helped to build new and exciting approaches to creativity, culture and business. Her presence in the Creative Commons community will be sorely missed. We are sure the whole community worldwide will join with us in wishing Jessica the best of luck in her future endeavours.

It has been a pleasure working with you.

- Prof Brian Fitzgerald and Elliott Bledsoe and all the ccAustralia team past and present

Credits—Photo: Adaptation (crop and resize) of ‘wave goodbye‘ by Michael (mx5tx), CC BY 2.0 Generic.

Throughout September we will be hosting one-day mini-conferences in Adelaide, Brisbane, Hobart, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney. Although we have released a preliminary template for the program, each city will be customised depending on who is attending. So if you’re interested in finding out about CC for the first time, looking for an update on recent developments and the Australian Version 3.0 licences, or wanting to know how CC is being used by people in your local area, register now! We’ll see you soon!

Credits—Image: Screen capture of Australia from OpenStreetMap, CC BY-SA 2.0 Generic. Font: ‘Rawengulk‘ by GLuk, SIL Open Font 1.1. Icons: ‘Remix’, ‘Noncommercial’, ‘Attribution’, ‘Share Alike’, ‘Copy’ and ‘No Derivative Works’ icons by Creative Commons Corporation, CC BY 3.0 Unported.

With this new site we’ve tried to make it much easier for you to find out about us and what we’re up to, learn more about how Creative Commons works through videos and factsheets and delve a little deeper through our research. Because the uptake of CC here in Australia is only becoming more prominent, we’ve also introduced sector launch pages that conveniently couple sector-focused information with filtered content about that sector from the main blog. Now it is much easier to keep up with information on CC uptake in the Creative Industries, Education or by Governments here in Australia.

And because everyone’s all about the social-web these days, we’ve also made it easy for you to keep up with our Twitter account with a slide on the home page that shows the five most recent tweets. Also, with our new ‘tweet this’ and ‘Like this’ buttons you can share our blog entries through your social network of choice with one click.

Watch this space over the coming months as we roll out even more new features!

Professor Brian Fitzgerald of the QUT Faculty of Law invites you to the launch of these two volumes to be launched by

Senator The Honourable Kate Lundy

Senator for the Australian Capital Territory

Dr Terry Cutler

Chair of the Review of the National Innovation System

and

Dr Nicholas Gruen

Chair of the Government 2.0 Taskforce

2.30 pm, Monday, 5 July 2010 at The Edge, State Library of Queensland, Stanley Place, Cultural Precinct, South Bank

Please RSVP to Elliott Bledsoe by Friday, 2 July 2010, by phone on 07 3138 9597 or e.bledsoe@qut.edu.au.

With 20 stories on everything from CC’s new Catalyst Grant, China’s Remix and Share art exhibition, and the new Into Infinity iPhone app, there’s something for everyone.

A great resource for all those interested in what’s going on with CC in our neighbourhood.

Credits—Image: Adaptation (crop and resize) of ‘Cover 2‘ by Lairaja, CC BY-SA 3.0 Philippine.

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/)… Full implementation will occur when the new web site is released in late 2010…
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.

Update (9 June) The APH website has now added the Creative Commons licences to its official copyright page, with an explanatory notice and description.

Credits—Photo: ’Parliament House‘ by Ryan Wick, CC BY 2.0 Generic.

Creative Commons Australia is pleased to announce the release of version 3.0 of the Australian Creative Commons licences.

The new licences bring Australia in line with the most current CC licence standards being used internationally by adding changes to clarify the operation of the licences and increase their compatibility with other open licensing systems. They also incorporate simplified formatting and language designed to align the licences with Australian conventions and increase their readability.

About the versioning process

For those unfamiliar with the Creative Commons versioning process, every few years Creative Commons updates its core licences to ensure they are keeping up with developments in the world of open access and copyright law. These developments may be the result of, for example, legal decisions, new technologies, or changes in community norms or expectations. The changes to the licences represent a ‘refining’ of the Creative Commons model to ensure it provides the best and most up-to-date tools for creators and users alike.

When new versions of the licences are released they become the new default standard for their region. The older versions remain accessible on the Creative Commons website but are no longer available through the Creative Commons licence chooser. Works already licensed remain under their original licence, unless the creator chooses to transfer them across to the new version.

About the v3.0 licences

The third versions of the Creative Commons international licences were released in 2007, and introduced three major changes:

• The addition of new ‘no endorsement’ language, which states that a person should not use the attribution required by all CC licences to improperly assert or imply an association or relationship with the licensor or author. This has been implicit in the Creative Commons licences from the start, but we thought it was worth making it explicit. For a more detailed explanation, see here.
• The inclusion of language in the BY-SA licence to make it possible for derivatives to be relicensed under a “Creative Commons Compatible License”. This change is an important first step towards CC’s long-held objective of increasing interoperability between different flexible content copyright licences. It is this language, for example, that allowed This is part of the same compatibility movement that led Wikipedia to be ported across to the BY-SA licence in May last year. More information about this change is provided here.
• The clarification of how moral rights and collecting society royalties are dealt with under the Creative Commons licences. You can read more about these changes here.

About the Australian licences

The Australian v3.0 licences port these changes across to an Australian legal context. They have been developed over the last few years via a public consultation process. We thank all of those who provided feedback on the licences, particularly our colleagues at CC Aoteoroa New Zealand and within the Australian government and non-profit sectors.

Our main aims during the Australian v3.0 drafting process were to ensure that the new licences:

• complied with Australian legal requirements and conventions;
• aligned with the rights and restrictions of the Unported (ie non-country specific) licences provided by Creative Commons; and
• were clear and easy for creators and users alike to read and understand.

Based on these aims, we made the following changes to the licences:

• adapting the Unported formatting and language to bring them more in line with Australian law and drafting conventions – mainly by using localised definitions and introducing lists and headings;
• simplifying some of the language, where this would not affect the legal interpretation of the licence – many of these simplifications were adopted from the recent version put together by our friends in New Zealand;
• a few minor additions to clarify the operation of the licences in the Australian context, in response to feedback from our consultation process – these included clarifying how the licences operate with respect to sublicensing and adding language to ensure that the licences comply with the requirements of Australian consumer protection law.

We are happy to release these licences, which we believe provide clear, reasonable and legally sound options for creators and users alike and represent a new best practice standard for the CC licences in Australia. If you would like any more information about the licences please feel free to contact us at .For more information on the versioning process contact the Creative Commons head office.

Credits—Screen capture: Of Attritbution, Attribution-Noncommercial and Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Australia licence Commons Deeds by Creative Commons Corporation, CC BY3.0 Unported.

I’m sure you’re all fans, but for those new to CC, Mayer and Bettle are the stars of a 5 minute animation, first commissioned for the QUT Smart Train back in 2005 to provide a simple and friendly introduction to CC. Created jointly by local animation team Blackbrow (aka Pete Foley and Chris Perren) and our own Elliott Bledsoe, the film has the little blue guys travel through land, sea and space while discussing what Creative Commons is and how it works. In 2008 Mayer and Bettle returned in glorious 3D in a sequel, joining Bettle’s biggest fan, Flik, in a through the looking glass CC world to talk about how to apply the CC licences to your material.

They grow up so fast. Over the last five years the exuberant Bettle and the long suffering Mayer have been viewed more than 20,000 times (and that’s on YouTube and Revver alone). Not bad for a couple of cut outs talking about a copyright licensing system. And thanks to their CC licences, the videos have also been subtitled, translated into French [update - and Polish!] and dubbed into Taiwanese. Not to mentioned shown in innumerable workshops, lectures, classrooms, conferences, festivals and even a pecha kucha, by CC family and friends.

So we tip our hats to the little duo (and now trio) and encourage you to revisit them every once in a while. And it’s never too late for more translations, mashups and remixes. May they continue to educate and inform people about more flexible copyright options well into the next decade.

Credits—Still: From ‘Mayer and Bettle‘ by Creative Commons Australia and Blackbrow, CC BY-SA 2.0 Australia.

The issue, guest edited by the ccAustralia and ccClinic teams, will focus on the mainstreaming of “open”. With Mozilla Firefox pushing towards a 25% share of the web browser market and the number of Creative Commons licensed works reaching more than 250 million in 2009, perhaps it is time to ask, ‘Is “open” the new black?’

PLATFORM: Journal of Media and Communication is an open-access journal published by the Media and Communications Program at the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne. We encourage submissions by postgraduate students working in media studies or related fields which critically examine the legal, social and technical parameters of open source, open content and open access.

For more information on the issue themes and deadlines, see here

Credits—Photo: Adaptation (crop and resize) of ‘Untitled‘ by pheezy, CC BY 2.0 Generic.

In the debate over the merits of last night’s conservative budget, there’s one thing we’d argue Swan did get right – the licensing.

The entire budget has been released under a Creative Commons Attribution licence. This means the material it contains – the deficit strategy, the fiscal aggregates, the government’s responses to the economic crisis – is all available for free reuse, by anyone, for any purpose, as long as the source is attributed.

A single document, even one that’s 350 pages long, may not seem like that big a deal compared to some of the other open government initiatives over the last few years – like the release of the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ entire store of census data under CC. But as a public endorsement of CC as the licence of choice for the Australian Federal Government, it’s huge.

Following the strong support for open access in the government’s response to the Gov 2.0 report last week, this is a great show of the government putting its money where its mouth is (sorry, I couldn’t resist). In fact, the last week has seen the release of three major Federal Government reports – the Budget, the Gov 2.0 response and the NBN Implementation Study – all under CC licences. This seems to be a great indicator that the government really means what it says – open access is going to be the default position for the Australian Federal Government from now on.

Bring on the remixes, mashups and YouTube tributes!

Update: And for those interested, a couple of good articles on the budget’s CC licensing by Craig Thomler and Computerworld.

This webpage tracks these developments and provides information about the use of Creative Commons licences by government agencies at all levels – local, State/Territory and Federal – in Australia.

Want to know more?

Follow CC in Government AU on Twitter at: @govCCAu or search for the hashtag #govCCAu for updates

See our related project site, Access to and Use of Public Sector Information (auPSI): http://www.aupsi.org

Or check out the Government Use of Creative Commons page on the CC International wiki.

The Creative Commons and Government guide

Our Guide to Applying Creative Commons Licences to Government Material has been developed to assist government agencies apply Creative Commons licences to their copyright materials when distributing them.

CC licences can be used by governments as a simple and effective mechanism to support the reuse of their copyright protected material, particularly where such material is made available in digital form online or distributed electronically (including on compact disc). In Australia, as in other countries worldwide, there is a growing awareness at the government level of the advantages of using open content licences (such as CC licences) when distributing copyright materials.

This guide explains how copyright law applies to government material, how copyright can be managed to facilitate beneficial open access practices by government and how Creative Commons licences can be used to achieve open access to government material.

You can download a DRAFT version of the guide from QUT ePrint repository. We welcome your comments so please help us in creating a better guide for everyone!

Big news from the Australian Federal Government on the issue of access to public sector information (PSI).

CCau followers will remember the Government 2.0 Taskforce report released in December last year, which gave Creative Commons a very big tick as the licensing model of choice for Australian PSI. The Federal Government’s official response to the report was released yesterday and is generally positive, with the Federal Government agreeing (at least substantially) to 12 of the 13 recommendations to come out of the report.

The response, which was released by the Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner via the Australian Government Information Office (AGIMO) blog, includes a commitment to the development of a comprehensive set of IP guidelines covering all Australian Federal agencies developed by the new Information Commissioner. These guidelines will, in principle, follow the Gov 2.0 recommendations that PSI should:

• be by default free, open, and reusable;
• be released as quickly as possible;
• only be withheld where there is a legal obligation preventing its release;
• be discoverable and accessible by a central government portal; and
• when it becomes available for public access under the Archives Act 1983, will be automatically licensed under an appropriate open attribution licence.

The response also includes a number of other CC relevant undertakings, including a commitment to a review of Australian law regarding orphan works by the Attorney-General’s Department, as well as the publication in the next few months of a “declaration of open government” stating that:

• using technology to increase citizen engagement and collaboration in making policy and providing service will help achieve a more consultative, participatory and transparent government
• public sector information is a national resource and that releasing as much of it on as permissive terms as possible will maximise its economic and social value to Australians and reinforce its contribution to a healthy democracy
• online engagement by public servants, involving robust professional discussion as part of their duties or as private citizens, benefits their agencies, their professional development, those with whom they are engaged and the Australian public. This engagement should be enabled and encouraged.

Regarding the Gov 2.0 Recommendations 6.3-6.6, which state that Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) should be the default licence for PSI, the report provides “agreement in principle,” undertaking that the IP Guidelines will not “impede the default open licensing position proposed in recommendation 6.3.” CC BY is rapidly becoming the licence of choice for Australian PSI, and the fact that the report, the announcement and the entire AGIMO blog are all under a CC BY licence is a good sign. The response also makes much of the National Government Information Licensing Framework (GILF) as an important tool in assisting government agencies in making information licensing decisions. GILF, a collaborative project between the Queensland Government and the Queensland University of Technology which is recognised internationally as a leader in the area, recommends and endorses the use of CC licences as the core of its model for the sharing of PSI.

This is the single biggest commitment to open access principles by the Australian Federal Government, and should mean that the majority of Australian government material will soon be available under open licences, hopefully with a CC basis. The assignment of responsibility for implementation of the commitment to the new Information Commissioner is also an encouraging move, and will hopefully see a more coordinated approach to IP policy across the Australian government as a whole.

A social engagement for all those interested in digital music and online business models.

ccAustralia’s Elliott Bledsoe is speaking at the Models are Hot event at the Brisbane Powerhouse next Tuesday as part of the Independent Music Project‘s Music Stimulants series. The panel, which also features alongside Tim Price from Musicadium and James Milsom from Melbourne-based group Ancient Free Gardeners, will explore new models of distribution, collaboration and commerce emerging around music in the digital age.

From the website:

For musicians these days, there is a sobering reality about the distribution of music content; wake up and smell the peer-to-peer! How can you ask for the cake and get to eat it too?

… It’s one thing for Girl Talk, Nine Inch Nails and Yoko Ono to give away their music, but what about at the other end of the scale? The panel will discuss new opportunities in the changed media environment, using Melbourne band Ancient Free Gardeners as a case study.

The panel is followed by a gig by Ancient Free Gardeners.

Music Stimulants is a series of monthly gigs and seminars being run by IMP in collaboration with the Powerhouse to bring musicians and music lovers together in stimulating discussion about today’s music.

Where: Turbine Platform, Brisbane Powerhouse
When: Tuesday, 27 April, 6 – 8pm
Topic: Models are hot