An Australian Creative Commons

Next up is Ian Oi from Blake Dawson Waldron, the lead lawyer on the development of the Australian CC licences. His talk builds on a collection called International Commons in the Digital Age which details the iCommons and related work. The key issue in his work on the project was of course the translatability of licences across national jurisdictions, but on the other hand the Australian licence also needed to reflect Australian specificities (such as the GST, for example).

Another issue related to the collection of commercial royalties. In the Australian context, the Australasian Performing Rights Association (APRA), for example, first needs to have the rights of collecting royalties for musical content assigned to it, which complicates the creative commons licencing system. APRA has taken a relatively cooperative approach here, and discussions are ongoing as to how to handle royalties for musical content.

Further, rights of attribution of the creator of a work, and of the integrity of that work, are covered in an Australian context by moral rights statutes, but the CC licence wording may be unclear as to the extent to which these moral rights are being asserted by content creators. Here, the CC licences themselves may need some further work in order to clarify the moral rights asserted or waived by the person granting the licence.

An interesting aside coming from the question and answer session: there is currently some work being done by the CC team on developing a wiki licence - which may well be very relevant to some of the issues emerging in the overall open content publishing environment that includes blogging and open news.