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The peak body in the Australian and New Zealand spatial industry -- Anzlic -- is expected to endorse Creative Commons as the basis of sharing data sets.

Data sharing is especially difficult in Australia. Although their are only 22 million people, there is a national government, nine state-level governments plus many hundreds of local governments.

Although there have been many attempts over the years to rationalise the functions of these governments, the system is riven by duplication and inefficiency, and this is mirrored by the datasets they produce.

Now, Anzlic has decided on Creative Commons. It is a set of standard copyright agreements that define a spectrum of possibilities -- between full copyright, as it would be conventionally understood, and the public domain.

It is particularly useful in environments where the copyright owner wishes to claim that ownership, not prohibit its use by third parties, but limit the use they can make of the claimed work.

For instance, certain standard CC licences, permit one to freely use a work, provided that one acknowledges the author. Other versions permit one to use a work, but not to sell it, or to derive saleable products from it.

Creative Commons is organised by a non-profit organisations, founded in the US in 2001. Its first licence set was released in 2002.

An Australian project has been established, based at the University of Technology in Brisbane. It is run by a panel led by Brian Fitzgerald, a professor in intellectual property law at QUT.

Speaking to the Free and Open Source Software for Geoinformation conference in Sydney 20-23 October, Anzlic chair Warwick Watkins said the of Creative Commons would dovetail into other initiatives to promote data sharing and re-use from Anzlic.

Speaking after his presentation, he noted that IT in general, and spatial IT in particular, had been sold on the basis that is would reduce operating costs – that it would make things cheaper.

'It was never that', he said. 'IT is expensive. You start to get real returns when you exploit the value of data, and that means re-using it'.

He said the executives of many organisations accepted this argument, but that problems of legal responsibility for data still weighed heavily on decision makers

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