Geoscience Australia recently announced that it will license all
images from the Landsat 8 satellite under CC BY. (Geoscience
Australia is a partner of the United States Geological Survey in
the Landsat program.) The new Landsat 8 satellite is scheduled
to be launched in early 2013, with GA’s full implementation
being scheduled for May or June 2013. Upon full implementation,
which involves the deployment of major infrastructure upgrades
by GA, data will be beamed from Landsat 8 on a daily basis to
GA-operated ground stations in Alice Springs and Darwin. As soon
as possible after receipt and processing, GA will make the
satellite images publicly available free of charge. GA will make
the data available under a Creative Commons CC BY Australia 3.0
licence, which will facilitate legal reuse of the images. GA is
expecting a major upsurge in demand for the images when its free
to air service is up and running. Jeff Kingwell, Section Leader
of GA’s National Earth Observation Group, has indicated this
prediction is