Landsat 5, Tiwi Islands, Darwin, Australia
Geoscience Australia / CC BY

Geoscience Australia recently announced that it will license all images from the Landsat 8 satellite under CC BY. (Geoscience Australia is a partner of the United States Geological Survey in the Landsat program.)

Creative Commons Australia reports:

The new Landsat 8 satellite is scheduled to be launched in early 2013, with GA’s full implementation being scheduled for May or June 2013.

Upon full implementation, which involves the deployment of major infrastructure upgrades by GA, data will be beamed from Landsat 8 on a daily basis to GA-operated ground stations in Alice Springs and Darwin. As soon as possible after receipt and processing, GA will make the satellite images publicly available free of charge.

GA will make the data available under a Creative Commons CC BY Australia 3.0 licence, which will facilitate legal reuse of the images.

GA is expecting a major upsurge in demand for the images when its free to air service is up and running. Jeff Kingwell, Section Leader of GA’s National Earth Observation Group, has indicated this prediction is based on the experience of its senior partner Geological Survey where there was a 1000 fold usage increase on commencement of its free to air service online. “Our experience is that using the Creative Commons Attribution Licence — which is the default licence for GA information — makes the data more useful and easier to apply. For example, to help the Indonesian government to monitor forest management, GA supplies Landsat data from a number of foreign data archives. Since we can apply the same licence conditions to each data source, the information is much more useful and easier to share and reuse.”

(Read the full article.)

Here at Creative Commons, we applaud governments and intergovernmental organizations licensing their information and data under CC licenses (or the CC0 public domain waiver). Australia’s partnership with the United States in the Landsat program is a perfect example of why it’s important to use a license that’s open and internationally applicable.