Creative Commons on Government Publications for Free School Use

Currently Australian schools and universities pay a fee when the reproduce materials from government websites. The fees are collected by the Copyright Agency, a non-government non-profit organization and distributed to the copyright holders. It seems reasonable for individual authors and publishers to be paid for use of their work, but does not make a lot of sense for pages copied from government websites, where the government wants maximum distribution of their material.

The Federal and Queensland Governments have open access policies, implemented mostly with a Creative Commons license. If other states were to adopt this policy (and their agencies were to implement it), then schools would not have to pay. That would not require a change in law.

Course Materials and Copyright

Recently I was asked by an author about copyright on materials in an academic book. This is a complex area, with different rules on what can be used in a classroom, in the notes handed out to students and in text books. Also the rules differ between text, images, video and sound. The ANU Library has prepared a "Copyright overview" and a list of the Licensing and Collection Agencies in Australia.

Getting Paid for Publishing Educational Material Online

Checking my bank account today I noticed a deposit from "Cal - Trust Copyright". It took me some time to work out this was from Copyright Agency Limited (CAL). This is an Australian not-for-profit organization which collects copyright payments and distributes them to publishers and authors. They also collect
and distribute payments under statutory licenses taken out by education and government organizations. The idea is that you say on your document that the
statutory licenses apply and then receive a payment when organizations use them. This doesn't stop you selling copies of the same materials to others, or even giving the material away on-line to other users.

The rules on who holds the rights to material and how the license fees are distributed is bewilderingly complex. But if you prepare some educational material yourself (not as an employee of a educational institution), then you may be entitled to a payment.