Stepping into the Commons

You pay taxes right? Rates too I bet. You like spending money don’t you. You love just throwing all your hard earned cash into a big pot to get squandered by those public servants who sit on their backsides all day doing nothing. Seeing your money wasted on marketing campaigns for services you will never need and paying for research that has already been completed elsewhere for something you don’t care about makes you happy as a proverbial wallowing pig. Best of all you love how when you want to borrow one of those marketing images or get some of the resultant information you have paid for you need to jump through dozens of red-taped hoops to get to it only to find out you can’t reuse it because of copyright. OK maybe I am being just a little over dramatic here but let’s face it; Creative Commons and Open Data in Government potentially effects everyone who is a tax payer.

When a council employee chooses to buy an image for use on the website rather than use a free image licensed under CC they are using your money. When they contract a photographer to take a photo and publish it under a copyright license they are using your money and they are preventing you from using it. When a government department creates a database on crime statistics in your area your money puts the bits and bytes on the hard drive you paid for and you can’t use it because you can’t get to it and you wouldn’t know what to do with it if you could because it is in some machine only readable format.

By expanding the information sharing opportunities in government and opening up the information which governments and councils are gathering, government employees have the potential to gain more than they would ever lose by attempting to retain their intellectual property.

As a taxpayer (or ratepayer when we are talking local government) you should take the time to consider some of the reasons why CC should be adopted as the default licensing model for government organisations. You should that is unless you like throwing your money away.

Share your information, share your images and videos and content, share this blog post and come back regularly for updates, links and thoughts on CC and open data in (Australian) Government.

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