The UK government recently made a splash with its move towards opening government data. Now CC Australia’s Jessica Coates shares a promising government initiative in her home country. The Victorian Government has become the first Australian government to commit to using Creative Commons as the default licensing system for its public sector information (PSI). Many…

July 14 the Australian Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy released Australia’s Digital Economy: Future Directions under a CC BY-NC-ND licence. Many readers of this blog will be especially interested in the report’s section on open access to public sector information: An open access approach to the release of public sector information is…

If you’re looking for excellent, brief, printable materials explaining various aspects of Creative Commons, check out CC Australia’s CC Infopacks. They’re also linked from our documentation wiki, and all licensed for remixing with your own course or other materials (of course). Also congratulations to CC Australia project lead Brian Fitzgerald, Seb Chan, Head of Digital,…

Remix My Lit – a Brisbane based, international remixable literature project – just released their first publication, Through the Clock’s Workings. Billed as the world’s first remixed and remixable anthology of literature, the whole project is released under a CC BY-NC-SA license and is available as a free digital download (PDF) or as a hardcopy…

Last November, the Center for Social Media at AU released a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education, which followed on the heels of a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video. These guides were aimed at clearing up many of the urban myths surrounding copyright, especially when…

Through its Copyright Advisory Group, the Australian Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA) has published a Creative Commons information pack online, a bundle of eight documents that distills the basics of CC licensing and the philosophy behind it. This pack is a great resource for educators and students, and we encourage…

Two Fists One Heart is a new family drama film from Australia, centered on the story of a young boxer. The film was released widely yesterday in theaters across Australia and to help promote the film, the producers have created a stand-alone site, Cut Your Own Scene, where fans can download rushes of the film…

From CC Australia: A couple of days ago the [Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s] excellent collaborative media site, Pool, posted a recording of genetics professor Steve Jones talking about Darwin’s life and work under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial licence. As far as we’re aware, this is the very first time material from the ABC archives has been…

team9, an Australian based electro act fronted by producer Neil Mason, just released their latest album We Don’t Disco for free download under a CC BY-SA license. From team9: I’ve spent the last few months neck deep on an original album – the first since 2003. ‘We Dont Disco’ is an electronic soundtrack to the…

In a small, easy to miss post, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has made a very exciting announcement. They’re going CC – and under an Attribution-only license, no less. From the ABS website: Creative Commons provides a spectrum of licensing for the use of intellectual property between full copyright and public domain – in…