CC0 is the default choice of the Dutch Government

CC0 on Dutch Government web-siteAs mentioned on the Creative Commons blog, the Dutch Government has decided that all content (that it holds the copyright or otherwise to), which is published at its main web-site, from 2010 as the default choice will be release under the Creative Commons license CC0 (Creative Commons Zero).

Under the CC0 the copyright holder can waive all copyrights and related or neighboring rights that he or she has over the work, such as moral rights (to the extent waivable), publicity or privacy rights, rights protecting against unfair competition, and database rights and rights protecting the extraction, dissemination and reuse of data.

This is great news for democratic access to and use of public information in the Netherlands as well as for Dutch taxpayers who now as the default rule will be allowed to freely reuse the materials that they paid for the creation of in the first place.

There is really no reason why the Danish Government should not adopt the same policy!

UPDATE: The UK Government has decided on 1 April 2010 to let the data made public at data.gov.uk be released under the OS OpenData Licence which explicitly has been made compatible with the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

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