Alex Lum

I would wholeheartedly applaud such a move by the Australian government to release public sector information under an open licence. This would be more in line with the United States where works of the U.S. federal government are public domain, and are free to be used by companies, organizations or individuals. Examples are photographs of politicians or scientific material which can be used by open-source projects like Wikipedia, or the TIGER geographic database which was imported into OpenStreetMap. At the moment, government information in Australia seems to be only slightly less restricted than in the United Kingdom, where government data is subject to Crown Copyright, and publicly-funded agencies such as the Ordnance Survey aggressively enforce their copyrights over their data and derivations thereof.