Australia set to give the go-ahead for Creative Commons licensingWhen you're dealing with a flooding emergency in the middle of the worst drought for many years, the Years, The the seven decades of Eleanor Pargiter’s life. [Br. Lit.: Benét, 1109] See : Time last thing you need is barriers to the sharing of geographical and meteorological me·te·or·ol·o·gy n. The science that deals with the phenomena of the atmosphere, especially weather and weather conditions. [French météorologie, from Greek information. Yet that's the situation faced by Australia. The authorities' response is to consider the widespread adoption of Creative Commons An organization that has defined an alternative to copyrights by filling in the gap between full copyright, in which no use is permitted without permission, and public domain, where permission is not required at all. licences for public-sector information. Last month, the government of Queensland The Government of Queensland is commonly known as the Queensland Government. The form of the Government of Queensland is prescribed in its Constitution, which dates from 1859, although it has been amended many times since then. approved the use of Creative Commons, which allows free re-use of copyright material subject to certain conditions, as part of a new licensing framework. Meanwhile, the Commonwealth (federal) government is expected to give the green light to creative commons in a new set of guidelines for the management of the government's intellectual property. The new Australian New Australian Noun Austral an Australian name for a recent immigrant, esp. one from Europe policy will be watched with interest by Britain's free-data movement. Historically, Australia is a pioneer of free data: a 1968 law exempted most data produced by the federal government from copyright protection. However - as in the UK - organisations can and do charge for certain kinds of data. Another complication is that licensing regimes vary from state to state. One result, says Baden Appleyard, a lawyer and research fellow at Queensland University of Technology, is "confusion, lack of interoperability The capability of two or more hardware devices or two or more software routines to work harmoniously together. For example, in an Ethernet network, display adapters, hubs, switches and routers from different vendors must conform to the Ethernet standard and interoperate with each other. and unnecessary expense in the provision and re-use of public-sector information". Last year, a study found that confusing government policies were harming a business worth up to A$12bn (£5.6bn) a year to the economy. "Government agencies often use their limited funds to collect, manage and distribute the data. This drives some agencies to adopt pricing policies that 'over-recover' the cost of producing information," says the report's author, David Hocking David Hocking, a Pro-Israeli, Zionist Evangelical Christian, was born in Long Beach, California in 1941, and raised in Southern California. He is notable for being one of the preeminent pastors and Christian leaders in the Southern California region for the past twenty five years, , chief executive of the Australian Spatial Information Business Association. Appleyard's group says that creative commons licensing offers a way to unlock the potential of this data. Researchers at Queensland will shortly publish a study on the pricing of public sector information which is expected to set out the case for making all government data free. We will watch with interest. In the meantime Adv. 1. in the meantime - during the intervening time; "meanwhile I will not think about the problem"; "meantime he was attentive to his other interests"; "in the meantime the police were notified" meantime, meanwhile , we think the UK government could usefully copy one set of Australian ideas: a policy review in 2002 which said that the government should not try to charge for data where to do so is not cost-effective, would be inconsistent with policy objectives or would unduly stifle competition and innovation. Bonza! · Join the debate at the Free Our Data blog: freeourdata.org.uk/blog 
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