Report to the Government 2.0 Taskforce
Project 4: Copyright Law and Intellectual Property
Professor Anne Fitzgerald was commissioned by the Government 2.0 Taskforce to lead Project 4: Copyright Law and Intellectual Property. Project 4 investigated the application of copyright law to public sector information, and how the law might be managed to facilitate broader access to and use of PSI.
The summary of the project report, as provided on the Government 2.0 Taskforce website, is as follows:
Professor Anne Fitzgerald examined the broad policy rationale for copyright in relation to public sector information and found that there is a strong case to realign Commonwealth copyright policy based on the principles of open access and re-use which would facilitate complex flows of information between and within the public and private sectors. The report stated that this could be achieved without the need for significant changes to copyright legislation by repositioning crown copyright to enable rather than restrict re-use; adopting copyright management practices appropriate to the Web 2.0 environment (e.g. standardised open licenses which provide clear statements of users’ permissions); and providing clearer guidance to agencies about the use of open licenses, and the meaning of ‘publication’ in the Copyright Act.
The 83-page project report is available here (Copyright Law and Intellectual Property - Report to the Government 2.0 Taskforce: Project 4) and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia Licence.