Creative Confusion (CC) with CC Licences and AU Govt Agencies
The use of Creative Commons licenses for Government resources (eg documents) is usually a good direction to take. However, when you do this you must be fully aware of the terms and condition clauses that comes with each CC license, otherwise there is a serious risk that the end user will not be granted the rights that they would expect.
All CC licenses include the Entire Agreement clause. See an example in Section 12 of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia Licence as shown here:
12. Entire Agreement
This Licence constitutes the entire agreement between the parties. To the full extent permitted by law, there are no understandings, agreements or representations with respect to the Work not specified here. The Licensor shall not be bound by any additional provisions that may appear in any communication from You. This Licence may not be modified without the written agreement of the Licensor and You.
What this basically means is that the CC Licenses is an “all or nothing” license - that is - the CC License and only the CC license applies to the Work (ie the document). No other terms and conditions can be used along with the CC license. This is appropriate as the model is that there is one license for the Work and the end user only needs to refer to the one place for all the terms and conditions.
However, there have been a number of cases where this requirement has been ignored for some Government resources. I assume that the proponents have simply not understood Clause 12 and/or have not been made aware of this restriction.
Here are two recent examples of high profile documents that assign CC licensees with additional terms and conditions.
The BUDGET STRATEGY AND OUTLOOK 2011-12 (BUDGET PAPER NO. 1) (PDF) has the following text on the second page:
Creative Commons licence
With the exception of the Commonwealth Coat of Arms (see below); the Budget logo; Statement 1: Budget Overview; Statement 2: Economic Outlook; Statement 3: Fiscal Strategy and Outlook; Statement 4: Opportunities and Challenges of an Economy in Transition, Statement 7: Asset and Liability Management, all material in this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia Licence.
This is quite a significant list of exclusions from the document (major sections of the report) and clearly in breech of Clause 12.
The National Digital Economy Strategy 2011 #au20 (PDF) has the following text on the second page:
Unless otherwise noted in the ‘Materials Excluded and Rights Reserved’ list below, the text in the DBCDE National Digital Economy Strategy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia licence.
Materials Excluded and Rights Reserved
All rights in the materials listed below are reserved:
Commonwealth Coat of Arms and Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy logo
all tables and images (including any text included, or embodied, in the table or image)
material appearing in quotes
material that is attributed to a source other than the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.
Again, a list of exceptions to the content of the document - in breech of Clause 12 again.
In fact - the Commonwealth Coat or Arms is “exempt” from CC licenses. This means that you cannot (ie must not) use any CC licenses that contains this image.
It is obvious that there are many scenarios not to use CC licenses for Government resources - as they are probably too open in the case of Budget or Strategy documents. In essence some resources are not meant to be “remixed” in typical open web style.
The UK have released the LicensingOpenData: A Practical Guide 2011 (PDF) in which it looks at a range of open licensing (of which CC is just one example) and also concludes that “it is probably sensible to consider simultaneously degrees of openness, rather than ‘open’ being an absolute standard.”
The use of CC licences by Australian Government agencies should be supplemented with this additional guide as well as some more basic education and training on the use of CC licenses to ensure that they are correctly used and legally binding. There should also be other options provided to Government Agencies as clearly the “all or nothing” CC licenses are not meeting the needs of that community.