Mr ---,

I was suggested to contact you by --- ---, who you may know. I am involved in Wikipedia/Wikimedia and a discussion has opened on the Wikimedia Ireland mailing list about the Government Press Office website (www.merrionstreet.ie). The question is over the re-use of content (images, text, etc.). As you are involved in the Creative Commons Ireland initiative, I thought you may be interested in this topic area and possibly helping us out.

Previously, from what we can tell, images were released under a (restrictive) Creative Commons licence (CC-BY-NC-ND). Now, it appears they have returned to "All rights reserved". A number of us as asking what possibilities there are to have all or some of the Government press content released under a Wikimedia-compatible licence (CC-BY-SA). In this effort, we have the encouragement of people working for the Wikimedia Foundation and offers of support from Wikimedia UK (an officail Irish chapter of Wikimedia is only in the discussion stages).

We are at the very early stages of investigating this. From our research so far, we can see that a possibly-free licence emerged from the European Communities (Re-Use of Public Sector Information) Regulations 2005 (SI 279 of 2005). That licenece is here:

	- http://psi.gov.ie/files/2010/03/PSI-Licence.pdf

More broadly, we can see that there may be some obligation on the State to encourage re-use of this kind of content as a result of that regulation (and the European directive that spurred it).

As brainstorm of approaches we could take, the following were suggested:

	- Identify what aspects of the current PSI license (if any) are incompatibe with respect to Wikimeida, convince the Government to change it (or adopt it as a secondary license) and implement it widely (including on Merrion Street).
	- Port a Wikimedia-compatible CC licence to Irish law and convince the Merrion Street (or the Government) to use that.
	- Lobby directly for Merrion Street to use a Wikipedia-compatible license (ported or not to Irish law) for some or all of the material it releases.
	- Develop a relationship with Merrion Street and other agencies so that we can ask them for specific material (or sets of material), which they will release to us under a compatible license at their discretion.

However, as we are only forming ourselves, we are entirely open to other ideas and suggestions.

For now we are only discussing the Merrion Street website. In future, we may want to move beyond the Merrion Street website and seek the State to use more liberal licences generally. Alternatively, we may seek the State to adopt policies of releasing a subset of content under liberal licences. We do appreciate that this will be easier said than done - and so don't expect things to happen over night.

Would you be willing toparticipate in our discussions or to help us out (to what ever degree you feel comfortable)? We are particularly lacking in legal expertise and so your assistance (or the assistance of anyone else you could recommend) would be hugely appreciated. I live in ---, if you would like to meet face-to-face to discuss these questions, or you can phone me on ---.

With best regards,
Oliver Moran