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CVIG-LEGAL-01 — Instructions brief for legal review (companion volume licensing)

Client: United Central Colleges of Australia Pty Ltd (ABN 59 168 872 535), trading as RTOpacks. Prepared: 2026-08-14, for Tim Rignold to send with the attachments below. Ruled by Tim, 2026-08-14: this legal read happens before any custodian letter is sent.

What we hold and what we plan

We hold 562 companion volume files (~1.0 GB) downloaded from training.gov.au (TGA), the national VET register operated by the Commonwealth. Companion volumes are implementation guides published alongside training packages, developed by Jobs and Skills Councils (JSCs) and their predecessor bodies. Our platform generates training and assessment material for registered training organisations; companion volumes are reference inputs to that work.

Our standing internal rule: no companion volume content enters any commercial store until a written legal position exists. Currently we hold the files in a quarantined archive and plan, in order: (tier 1) use of current volumes; (tier 2) the same use for historical releases still needed by RTOs teaching out superseded qualifications; (tier 3) retention of the archive as a record/provenance store, never surfaced to customers.

What the census measured (attachments carry the detail)

We ran a full licence census over all 562 files. Headlines: 334 of 561 classified files (59.5%) carry no copyright or licence notice at all (verified at full document text on samples); 122 carry CC BY-NC-SA; 39 carry a NoDerivatives variant; 37 carry a copyright notice with no licence grant; 15 carry CC BY 4.0 (some stated only as "Licenced under Creative Commons 4.0", no variant); 13 carry "© PricewaterhouseCoopers Data and Analytics Services Pty Limited. All rights reserved."; 7 could not be machine-read.

The questions we need answered, in priority order

  1. Host-dependent licence text. The same document appears to carry different licence text depending on where it is downloaded from: TGA's copy of one guide reads "Licenced under Creative Commons 4.0" (no variant), while the JSC-hosted copy of the same guide is recorded as CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Which copy governs, and what diligence position should we adopt where copies conflict?
  2. The no-notice majority. For the 334 files with no notice and the 37 with copyright but no licence grant: what is the default position under the Copyright Act, who is the presumptive owner (Commonwealth, JSC, or predecessor body), and what use can be made pending a custodian's answer?
  3. Third-party rights. The 13 PwC files sit in training packages formerly developed by "PwC's Skills for Australia" (a defunct predecessor body whose parent is the entity printed in the notice). Does a permission grant from the current JSC custodian reach that material, and what should our custodian letters ask to find out?
  4. NoDerivatives. 39 files carry an ND variant. Our use case is generating derived material. What uses (internal reference, extraction of facts vs expression, transformation) remain open under ND, and does tier 3 (record-only retention) raise any issue?
  5. NonCommercial. For the 122 BY-NC-SA files: the boundary of "commercial" for a paid platform whose customers use the material for regulated training delivery.
  6. The letters. We have a draft enquiry letter to custodians (attached). Please review before anything is sent; we intend to add: "which copy of your volumes carries the authoritative licence text, and where is it hosted?"

What we are asking for

A written legal position covering the six questions, sufficient for us to decide per licence class: what may enter the commercial store, what needs permission first, what stays record-only. Deadline pressure is modest — the platform work is sequenced so nothing blocks on this — but the custodian letters wait on your read.

Attachments

  1. CVIG-LICENCE-CENSUS-01-REGISTER-2026-08-14.csv — 964 rows, per-file classification with verbatim notices (sha256 dd42c032…).
  2. CVIG-LICENCE-CENSUS-01-REPORT-2026-08-14.md — method, verification, findings (sha256 6ae44cf7…).
  3. CVIG-LICENCE-CENSUS-01-VERDICT-2026-08-14.md — our internal review, incl. the PwC predecessor-body observation (sha256 dc837bce…).
  4. CVIG-LICENCE-ENQUIRY-EMAIL-DRAFT-2026-08-14.md — the draft custodian letter, unsent.