Copyright and compliance

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.

• ACC ACCC CC BY 4.0
• AGR Agriculture CC BY 4.0
• AIH AIHW CC BY 4.0
• APR APRA CC BY 4.0
• ARC ARC CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
• ASI ASIC CC BY 4.0, with exclusions
• ATO ATO Permissive
• ATS ATSB CC BY 4.0
• ATT Attorney-General's CC BY 4.0
• CEF CEFC All rights reserved
• CER CER CC BY 4.0
• CSI CSIRO CSIRO copyright
• DCC DCCEEW CC BY 4.0
• DEF Defence All rights reserved
• DFA DFAT CC BY 4.0
• DSS DSS CC BY 4.0
• EDU Education CC BY 4.0
• FIN Finance CC BY 4.0
• HEA Health Restricted
• HOM Home Affairs CC BY 3.0 AU
• IND Industry CC BY 4.0
• INF Infrastructure CC BY 4.0
• INF Infrastructure Australia CC BY 3.0 AU
• NOP NOPSEMA CC BY 3.0
• NTC NTC Creative Commons, conditional
• PRO Productivity Commission CC BY 4.0
• SER Services Australia CC BY 4.0
• TRE 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.