NTLSN · Commitment
NTLSN maps Australian higher education from unceded lands. This commons is openly licensed — and there is a boundary to that openness which deserves to be stated where people actually read, not only in a licence file. This page is that statement, and it is written to be corrected.
No licence NTLSN grants — not the MIT licence on our code, not the Creative Commons licences on our data and content — extends to First Nations cultural and intellectual property (ICIP).
The reason is not caution. It is that we do not hold the authority. Much First Nations knowledge is collectively held rather than individually authored, governed by customary law rather than copyright, and may have no "author" in the sense copyright recognises — or may be held by custodians who never consented to it being fixed in a shareable file. A copyright licence, however generous, operates inside categories that were not built to recognise collective, intergenerational, place-based custodianship. To licence such knowledge would be to assert an authority this platform does not have. An open licence over knowledge can itself be an act of enclosure. We decline it.
Traditional-country information on this site — the Country each institution stands on — is presented as acknowledgement, not as licensable content. It appears because respect requires it, and it is corrected the moment someone with authority tells us it is wrong.
The Acknowledgement of Country and Unceded Lands elements are load-bearing, not decorative. Our project conventions forbid stripping, abbreviating or reordering them for layout convenience — that rule is written into the repository itself, where contributors and automated tools read it.
We follow True Tracks. Where copyright's categories fail, we look to the ICIP framework built over two decades by Terri Janke, a Wuthathi and Meriam lawyer: True Tracks — Indigenous cultural and intellectual property principles.
Written to be corrected. On every question this page touches, authority rests with First Nations peoples — not with NTLSN, and not with its author. If anything here is wrong — a wording, an attribution of Country, a boundary drawn in the wrong place — tell us and we will fix it. Being corrected is not a failure of this page; it is the page working as designed.
Honesty requires one more sentence. Structural safeguards and acknowledgements reduce the risk of a commons universalising its makers' assumptions — they do not retire it. Only shared governance with First Nations partners — governance, not consultation — would do that. NTLSN is not there yet, and we would rather say so plainly than imply otherwise. This page will be updated as that changes.
This statement complements the LICENSE file, which carries the same ICIP carve-out in its formal terms.