Professor Anne Fitzgerald has now released her compiled literature review (available online from QUT ePrints at: Compiled Literature Review in hard copy. The 324-page publication entitled, ‘Open Access Policies, Practices and Licensing: A Review of the Literature in Australia and Selected Jurisdictions’, sets out the findings of an extensive review of published materials dealing with policies, practices and legal issues relating to information access and reuse, with a particular focus on materials generated, held or funded by public sector bodies.

If you would like a free copy, please contact Kylie Pappalardo at k.pappalardo@qut.edu.au

The following are some examples of the Creative Commons licence injector. Using software developed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the licence injector embeds copyright licence information into the metadata of an object and directly into the object itself.

Demonstrative files:

• Photo of Professor Brian Fitzgerald, taken by Nic Suzor at the Copyright Future: Copyright Freedom Conference 2009
  

Professor Brian Fitzgerald of QUT Law School has been appointed to the new Government 2.0 Taskforce, announced Monday 22 June 2009. The Terms of Reference for the Taskforce are that the Taskforce will advise and assist the Australian Government to:

• make government information more accessible and usable — to establish a pro-disclosure culture around non-sensitive public sector information;
• make government more consultative, participatory and transparent — to maximise the extent to which government utilises the views, knowledge and resources of the general community;
• build a culture of online innovation within Government — to ensure that government is receptive to the possibilities created by new collaborative technologies and uses them to advance its ambition to continually improve the way it operates;
• promote collaboration across agencies with respect to online and information initiatives — to ensure that efficiencies, innovations, knowledge and enthusiasm are shared on a platform of open standards; and
• identify and/or trial initiatives that may achieve or demonstrate how to accomplish the above objectives.

For more information, see the Government 2.0 Taskforce blog.

Change Congress and Regulatory Transparency:

CHANGE v2: What changes Obama will need?

In this Public Lecture Professor Lawrence Lessig will talk about the Change Congress project that aims to persuade members of congress to rely for funding on citizen contributions rather than big donations from special interests. The organisation considers that funding by corporate special interests has caused members of congress to favour these interests, undermining the integrity of the legislative process and resulting in legislation that may harm the public interest.

The aims of Change Congress are consistent with Barack Obama’s goal to achieve a transparent political culture that restores public trust. Its success may be critical to Obama’s hopes for enlisting congressional support for ambitious reforms to solve domestic and political crisis.

The free public lecture will be hold on Friday 29 May 2009, at The Banco Court, Law Courts Complex, 304 George Street, Brisbane.

Photograph by Joi from Flickr, Licensed under CC (US) Attribution 2.0 Generic

This conference - Copyright Future: Copyright Freedom – will be held at Old Parliament House (OPH) in Canberra on Wednesday 27th May and Thursday 28th May 2009. The month of May in 2009 marks 40 years since the commencement of the Australian Copyright Act of 1968.

The conference will consider the history of copyright law with special focus on the excellent work of Benedict Atkinson on the True History of Australian Copyright Law (2007). It will also chart the path of copyright law since that time and give special focus to future possibilities. The conference will be opened by the Honourable Robert McClelland Attorney-General for the Commonwealth of Australia and our Keynote Speaker will be Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University Law School.

Some of our researchers have been investigating the access regimes in Australia and internationally for access to and use of public sector information (PSI). For more information, visit auPSI.

Legal Strategies for Streamlining Collaboration in an e-Research World is a collection of papers that arose from discussions held at a Roundtable entitled: ‘Streamlining Collaboration in an e-Research World’ which was convened by the Legal Framework for e-Research Project and held on 12th and 13th of June of 2008 at the Queensland University of Technology.

The Roundtable attracted some of Australia’s and the world’s leading thinkers and practitioners in this area and sought to explore methods and to recommend strategies for improving the efficiency of the legal processes that are used in e-Research collaboration. These ideas are presented in this collection and it also contains copies of submissions made to the Review of the Australian Innovation System in 2008 which set the context for the Roundtable and these papers.

Legal Framework for e-Research: Realising the Potential contains papers from the Legal Framework for e-Research Project’s International Conference held on 11 and 12 July 2007 in Surfers Paradise, Queensland, Australia.

“The recognition that increasingly sophisticated ICT techniques would need to be matched by increasingly sophisticated ways of thinking about some of the
legal issues that might arise, particularly given the minefield posed just by conditions relating to the collection and availability of data across a wide
number of fields, therefore led to the initiative represented by the contents of this report. We need skilful thinking about the legal context for all of the
rapid and new, indeed scarcely definable activities that are mushrooming in this sphere. An early start on this was the July 2007 conference on the topic.

It is my pleasure to commend the papers in this volume for those interested in considering the many interesting challenges posed for researchers, legal
specialists and administrators in this area.”

Professor Tom Cochrane
Deputy Vice Chancellor of QUT
Chair of the Australian e-Research Infrastructure Council (AeRIC)
Brisbane, 30 June 2008