Crown copyright user testing

One of the key findings of the Power of Information Taskforce is that Crown copyright needs to be easier for people to understand. With recommendation 12 of their report the taskforce called on OPSI to “begin a communications campaign to re-present and improve understanding of the permissive aspects of Crown Copyright along the lines of creative commons by end June 2009”. In particular we were asked to give consideration to the use of symbols and other visual ways of representing re-use conditions. The idea of a “Crown Commons” brand was also mooted in discussion on the draft report as the government equivalent to creative commons.

So, we wanted to better understand what we are up against. Are we inadvertently deterring people from re-using government information? What do people really understand about copyright and Crown copyright more specifically? Do symbols help? Can we just switch to using creative commons licences and everyone will magically understand?

To come up with some answers we commissioned a piece of user testing. If you took part in the online survey we did for this project a couple of months ago, thank you for your time and effort. We’re publishing the results here in full, so people with an interest in the topic can read what we learnt and comment on the results. We were staggered to have almost 1,500 survey responses. There are certainly some startling conclusions – such as the comparative softening effect adding the word “Crown” has on the word “copyright”. We were also surprised about people’s understanding of creative commons and the usefulness of the iconography.

Anyway here are the results:

• Crown copyright user testing (PDF - 1224K)
• Crown copyright user testing (ODP - 2682K)
• Crown copyright user testing (PPS - 3040k)

Comments

[Richard]

Why not simply do away with CC - I can't envisage why it exists in the first place.The low-cost, sensible solution.

[John Drinkwater]

The OpenDocument file doesn’t exist on the server, can you make sure the filename for the link is correct?

[John Sheridan]

Thanks for spotting that John. I mistyped the URL, now fixed.

[John Drinkwater]

Finally got around to reading; some elements of the second half worry me, especially the bits about cloning Creative Commons - confusion will come from both sharing CC abbr., i’ll have to write a longer post another day though, EU elections are distracting me.

[Baden Appleyard]

The Queensland Government in Australia has established a website to assist Govt agencies adopt Creative Commons as part of their overall information management processes. The website was created with the support of the Cross Jurisdictional CIO's Committee, representing all of the state and Federal CIO's. http://www.gilf.gov.au

[Michael Rose]

I was wondering if it was possible to get a copy of the actual report??

[Improbulus]

Would OPSI please clarify the waiver of Crown copyright for primary / secondary legislation etc?

The current guidance seems inconsistent. This FAQ http://www.opsi.gov.uk/about/faqs-crown-copyright#k only requires that the material be "reproduced accurately and not in a misleading context" (plus acknowledgement of source etc).

However the guidance at http://www.opsi.gov.uk/advice/crown-copyright/copyright-guidance/waiver-of-crown-copyright (see the last line) says the material must be reproduced accurately AND "kept up to date".

If a citizen copies and pastes parts of original legislation from the OPSI website but the legislation has been amended by later laws, does this mean the waiver won't apply because the reproduced material has not been "kept up to date"? Given that even government bodies have trouble keeping text of consolidated legislation bang up to date, how can ordinary citizens manage to do so?

As you can imagine, I hope that the "kept up to date" bit will be removed as soon as possible!

And I too would be very interested to see the report itself as and when available.

Cheers

(PS would you please also consider allow markup in comments? I tried to link the references and use emphasis but they got wiped out, so apologies for the long URLS and use of capitals above)

[Rob Styles]

Hi,

very interesting report with some great insights into public perception of these questions.

Could you fix the documents, though. The PDF has a lot of graphs blacked out and the PPS is File Not Found.

Thanks.