From Glenn Thorpe a true copyright horror story. Under U.S. law government documents cannot be copyright. Under British law they are automatically copyright, and that is true in places such as Australia which use the British system. Here the true nature of copyright is more clear: of course government agencies have no greater incentive to "create" new works because the get a monopoly. Rather copyright is used to control the flow of information. This turns out is true of maps in Australia. The details can be found in this ZD article. The gist is that Google Maps was extremely helpful to people who needed to escape the fire...except for the Government maps which Google was not allowed to access - access was allowed only through the government website, which needless to say got overwhelmed by people fleeing the fire. If someone did illegally copy those government maps? Glenn suggests "Maybe they [the government] should get the RIAA lawyers involved to sue anyone left alive that obtained information on the fires from any source other than their website!"