Copyright and compliance
How FOI Monitor sits within Australian freedom of information, copyright and privacy law, and the terms each agency places on its content.
Legal basis
FOI Monitor is a non-commercial, public-interest index. Section 11C of the Freedom of Information Act 1982 (Cth) requires an agency to publish most information it has released under the Act on its website within 10 working days of giving the applicant access. Publishing a disclosure log is a statutory requirement. FOI Monitor indexes those logs and does not obtain documents through any other channel.
Copyright in agency content
Content taken from a disclosure log remains the copyright of the agency that released it. FOI Monitor claims no ownership of it.
Most agencies publish under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0), in line with the Australian Government's open access and licensing framework and the OAIC's principles on open public sector information. Where an agency applies more restrictive terms, FOI Monitor relies on the fair dealing provisions of the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), sections 40 and 42, for research, study and reporting news on matters of public interest. The terms for each agency are listed below.
FOI Monitor's own work
The summaries, the extracted and structured text, the metadata and the site itself are original work. Summaries are labelled as AI-generated wherever they appear and are offered as a reading aid, not as a substitute for the document. The source code is published at FOI Monitor on GitHub.
Privacy
Personal information that appears in a release was assessed by the releasing agency under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles before publication. FOI Monitor collects no personal information beyond what agencies have already published, and it collects none from visitors beyond ordinary server logs. How to ask for a release to be hidden, and what the site records about visitors, is on the privacy and takedown page.
How agency websites are read
FOI Monitor reads each disclosure log the way a careful visitor would. It follows each site's
robots.txt rules, including any crawl delay the agency asks for, and paces its
requests to each site so that no agency sees a burst of traffic. Where an agency blocks
access to particular paths or file types, those files are left alone.
Licence terms by agency
The terms each agency places on the content of its disclosure log. Each name links to the agency's own copyright page, which is the authoritative statement.
- ABS CC BY 4.0
- ACCC CC BY 4.0
- ACMA CC BY 4.0
- ACNC CC BY 4.0
- ACQSC Restricted
- AER CC BY 4.0
- AFP Non-commercial, unaltered form
- Agriculture CC BY 4.0
- AIHW CC BY 4.0
- AMSA CC BY 4.0
- APRA CC BY 4.0
- APSC CC BY 4.0
- ARC CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
- ARENA CC BY 2.5 AU
- ASIC CC BY 4.0, with exclusions
- ATO Permissive
- ATSB CC BY 4.0
- Attorney-General's CC BY 4.0
- Austrade CC BY 4.0
- Bureau of Meteorology CC BY 4.0, with exclusions
- CASA CC BY 4.0
- CEFC All rights reserved
- CER CC BY 4.0
- Climate Change Authority CC BY 4.0
- Comcare CC BY 4.0
- CSIRO CSIRO copyright
- DCCEEW CC BY 4.0
- Defence All rights reserved
- Defence Housing Australia CC BY 4.0
- DEWR CC BY 4.0
- DFAT CC BY 4.0
- DSS CC BY 4.0
- DTA CC BY 4.0
- DVA Non-commercial, unaltered form
- Education CC BY 4.0
- eSafety CC BY 4.0
- Fair Work Ombudsman CC BY-NC 4.0
- Finance CC BY 4.0
- GBRMPA CC BY 4.0
- Health Restricted
- Home Affairs CC BY 3.0 AU
- Industry CC BY 4.0
- Infrastructure CC BY 4.0
- Infrastructure Australia CC BY 3.0 AU
- IP Australia CC BY 4.0
- IPEA CC BY 4.0
- NACC CC BY 4.0
- National Archives CC BY 4.0
- National Capital Authority CC BY 4.0
- NDIS Commission CC BY 4.0
- NEMA CC BY 4.0
- NIAA CC BY 4.0
- NOPSEMA CC BY 3.0
- NTC Creative Commons, conditional
- NZEA CC BY 4.0
- OAIC CC BY 4.0
- Productivity Commission CC BY 4.0
- RBA CC BY 4.0
- Safe Work Australia CC BY 4.0
- Services Australia CC BY 4.0
- TEQSA CC BY 3.0 AU
- Treasury CC BY 4.0
Contact
Agencies and individuals with a concern about how FOI Monitor uses their content, or who want something removed, can write to ed.miller@energyfuturesfoundation.org. The privacy and takedown page sets out the response time.