Australian Census Data Released Under CC License, But Official Site Tries To Make It Hard To Download

from the once-free,-always-free dept

The whole point about adopting Creative Commons licenses is to make it easier for people to share and use works released under them. Sometimes, though, you get the impression that certain organizations adopting these licenses would rather that didn't happen, as in the following case from Australia, reported by IT News: The Australian Bureau of Statistics has released the latest census data for free under a Creative Commons license but appears to be steering people towards a $250 mailed out DVD rather than making it easy to download the information directly over the internet.



Programmer and freelance journalist Grahame Bowland who first noticed it, said the government agency is going to great lengths to discourage people from downloading the files directly by dint of a convoluted site layout and Javascript functions that obfuscate file paths. The post then goes on to describe in detail some of the attempts to make it difficult to download all of the census data, including a hard-to-find registration page, a complex matrix of download options, and Javascript code that does stuff like this: // Function: guidGenerator

// Description:returns a pseudo-random GUID

//This is appended to a url for 2 reasons

//1. to make the URL unique, so that the browser always gets it and doesn't use a cached version

//2. to make a URL look like its got a unique key, in a naive attempt to fool a not-so-wily hacker

//into thinking they can't download a datapack directly if they know the URL pattern, because they

//need a unique key. Notice how anyone who might want to download datapacks directly is branded a hacker. That's a worrying attitude, since it seems to equate people who want to take advantage of the CC license to explore the census without jumping through the site's hoops as shady subversives (I doubt the comment used the term "hacker" in its more positive sense).

As the IT News story suggests, the motivation for this obfuscation seems to be to encourage people to pay AU $250 (about US $257) for the DVD version instead. To save others from having to deal with the unhelpful Web site, Bowland generously stumped up the $250 himself, and made the full census database freely available as a torrent, as is perfectly legal under the CC-BY license. This shows perfectly why it is pointless trying to make it hard for people to download content that is CC licensed: once anyone has obtained a copy, they can then make it available in a more convenient form, neatly by-passing forlorn attempts to control something that has been set free forever.

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Filed Under: australia, creative commons, open data