This post is hugely late, but I’ve only just realised that I never actually posted notice of the Government 2.0 Taskforce final report, or the project report that I did with Professor Anne Fitzgerald for the Government 2.0 Taskforce.

So, without further ado, here are the relevant links:

The final report of the Government 2.0 Taskforce, entitled, “Engage: Getting on with Government 2.0” (December 2009) is available here. The report makes a number of important recommendations, including:

Recommendation 6: Make public sector information open, accessible and reusable

6.1 By default Public Sector Information19 (PSI) should be:

• free
• based on open standards
• easily discoverable
• understandable
• machine-readable
• freely reusable and transformable.

6.2 PSI should be released as early as practicable and regularly updated to ensure its currency is maintained.

6.3 Consistent with the need for free and open re-use and adaptation, PSI released should be licensed under the Creative Commons BY standard as the default…

The Government 2.0 Taskforce commissioned a number of projects to assist them with examining various areas of policy relating to their government 2.0 agenda. I assisted Professor Anne Fitzgerald with Project 4: Copyright Law and Intellectual Property. Our project report is available here. Here is the summart of the project report, as provided on the Government 2.0 Taskforce website:

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.