Hi All, Just a bit of an update on some of the things that Creative Commons Australia are up to that are related to Wikimedia...
1. A couple of weeks ago I believe it was Russavia who was asking about the Australian War Memorial (AWM) given commons was working out how to deal with many deletions of their content from Commons due to not being in the PD in the US -- due to URAA. I've had a bit of a chat and they're apparently having some internal meetings to re-investigate their stance on what they do when they own the relevant IP to content - and CC-BY is specifically on the table as an option. So that's great. Even so, It'll take a fair amount of time for any formal policy change to happen even if everything goes "our way". Watch this space... [these meetings are not 'in response to the URAA' but just conveniently timed]. 2. I'm in late-stage talks with the National Museum of Australia (NMA) to donate about 50 images of objects currently on display in their collection - CC-BY at 100pixels (and also hopefully a TIFF quality aerial shot of the museum itself). This will be their first foray into Creative Commons so I'm quite happy. They're currently just making sure all the metadata is ready, the captions are checked by the curators, and approval for this gets checked by various managers (given it's their first time using CC). 3. This Friday morning CC-Australia is hosting a general intro to the cultural sector (and anyone else really) about Creative Commons in Melbourne. http://creativecommons.org.au/ccmelb2012 Myself and some other folk are presenting. Feel free to register and come along if you're interested/able (though I think anyone on these lists is already very familiar with how CC works :-) ) Steven Z - would you be happy my sending any GLAMs your way who are interested in talking to a Wikimedian locally? 4. After this the CC team is meeting with Museum Victoria to help them over the line to adopt CC for their collection database and other parts of their IP. This discussion is about halfway between the AWM and the NMA in terms of its progress. 5. Last night I went to a public lecture hosted at UTS (Sydney) called "New Models for Copyright Law Reform" and run by the University of Melbourne http://www.ipria.org/events/seminar/2012/CopyrightLawReform/CopyrightReform.htmlThe Chair of the proceedings was Jill McKeogh who is the commissioner of the forthcoming Australian Law Reform Commission's review of the Copyright Act. The presenters (Dan Hunter and Julian Thomas) spent a good proportion of their talks discussing how the Wikipedia Blackout against SOPA/PIPA was so influential and important. They also argued that the copyright lobby's insistence on 'commercial-incentives being the only justification for creators' was basically bollocks. You could practically hear the copyright maximalists in the room grinding their teeth (and they were all there - including reps. from AFACT, the various collecting societies, the Copyright Council...). I spoke briefly with Commissioner McKeogh afterwards and she said she was very interested in receiving submissions that are from organisations who are not the usual suspects [I'm paraphrasing, not quoting!]. So... I highly recommend that Wikimedia Australia (perhaps in collaboration with others) make a submission when the call is published - which should be soon. http://www.alrc.gov.au/inquiries/copyright (although, the review's ability to do anything will be limited by the scope the TPP and ACTA trade agreements http://www.zdnet.com.au/acta-tpp-limit-scope-of-copyright-review-339339620.htm- the author of this article was also at the seminar). Personally, I'll be making a short, private submission focusing specifically on getting a statutory provision equivalent to the bridgeman v. corel precedent included in the Copyright Act. 6. Tomorrow myself and some other CC folks are meeting with the ABC in Sydney to followup on the donation a few months ago of those 20 videos https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Files_from_the_Australian_Broadcasting_CorporationWe're presenting metrics on use etc. and seeing what "stage 2" might look like. 7. Finally, I was invited to speak a couple of weeks ago at the State Library of NSW's hosting of the State reference librarian's networking group meeting http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/services/public_libraries/networking/index.htmlThey've been hearing about the progress at the QLD regional Wiki training program that Wikimedia Australia's been running over the last few months and are quite interested to undertake a similar project across regional NSW. Which is awesome. Their Chair has written about this and I've forwarded it on to JohnVdB. So, sorry for the omnibus email, just though I should keep everyone in the loop :-) Hope everyone's well, -Liam wittylama.com/blog Peace, love & metadata
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