Australian Copyright Laws Stymied Google Bushfire Map Overview
from the what's-the-purpose-of-copyright-again? dept
In the US, any documents produced by the federal government are in the public domain and not covered by copyright. However, that's not necessarily true in other countries. Australia, for one, has the concept of Crown copyright, where the government retains copyright on its documents. Sometimes that creates ridiculous scenarios, such as last week, when Google was trying to create a map overlay of useful information about the extent of the massive Australian bushfires that killed hundreds. Instead of being able to map all of the fires, the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment denied Google's request to get data needed to plot the fire's location on public lands, citing Crown copyright. Yes, it appears the government blocked this useful resource because of copyright issues.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: australia, bushfire, crown copyright, google maps
Companies: google
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Or did I hallucinate that?
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Re:
Depends on which country's documents your are speaking of and in which country you use them in along with which country you are a citizen of.
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Re: US Government non-copyright
The fact that information is public record and not copyrighted or copyrightable doesn't mean that you have easy access to it. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) can get you access to a lot of information that is routinely private to a government agency, but is technically public. Other recent anti-terrorism acts have sometimes made public information problematic to access.
Stephen
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Shocking...
Nothing to see here. *(burning building collapses in the background)* Move along, move along.
David T
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hmmm
I;m sure there was some other resource for doing just that (right?) but if not then I would think Google would try and play up the public safety card.
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copyright and communism
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It's shameful that the copyright could be used to block dissemination of information like this. But I'm inclined to suspect that the Department just didn't want to expose just how poor their information was/is.
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