The Association Of Artist Managers ProfileA leaked document has revealed how seriously the government is considering bowing down to pressure by tech giants like OpenAI and Anthropic to do the exact thing that we’ve been fighting against for the best part of a year now – watering down copyright law.
“Wait… didn’t we already settle this?!” I hear you say. Yes. You are not reading an old article or thought piece. To our absolute exhaustion, this fight is still not over.
Prime Minister Albanese promised the creative industries that artists would retain control of the price and value of their work. He said "writers and musicians", not copyright owners. And he said the value of "their work" meaning, the value wouldn't be decoupled from the actual value of individual works. That’s not what this proposal is suggesting AT ALL.
The first part of the proposal is that copyright owners have an opportunity to opt out if they don’t want their material scraped.
First of all, "writers and musicians" are not always in control of their own creations if the copyright is owned by someone else, but that’s complexity saved for a whole other article. Second of all, don't get me started on opt-out psychology and how badly it fails the test of affirmative consent, or this will turn into a thesis.
Thirdly, even if an artist / copyright owner did opt out their works, according to the proposal, AI companies are only required to make “best efforts” to avoid pirated material. This means that the onus is on the artist / copyright owner to have to implement digital protection for their creative outputs wherever they exist online in order to ensure this “opt-out” will be effective. If some rando has ripped your music and put it up online on the other side of the planet, and you don’t know about it in order to put digital protection on it, these tech companies’ trawlers can scrape it and legally train from it in Australia. Unlucky!
The tech companies don’t want to be the party responsible for finding out whether they’re allowed to legally train on the outputs their trawlers find online, they don’t want to accept the infringement risk if it doesn’t work out for them, and they also don’t want to pay for the process involved in absorbing this digital protection responsibility, despite the fact that they’re shoving it down our throats, and despite the fact that it should already be protected by copyright law itself.
Cool, cool.
All of this doesn’t even touch on the part of the deal that proposes that for any rights holders who don’t opt out, once the AI companies reached a certain quota of deals, “No additional $ would be payable to creators or rights holders beyond deals negotiated to achieve quota.” Just… you know… ‘cause.
These tech companies are trying to sell a pipe dream to this government, the benefits of which they would remove in a second if it suits the commercial interests of these powerful juggernauts, who are drunk on the delusion of moving fast and breaking things.
And we should know – we are the music industry. These types of deals are what we grew up with. We know how to spot these actors and these deals a mile away. How can we negotiate with people who are trying to change laws to retrofit amnesty for crimes they’ve already committed, and provide convenience for these commercial entities who have the money and resources to pay for everything themselves? If they can license 1 million items of content legally, they do not NEED the 1-million-and-1st item, call it a ‘long tail’, claim they can’t reach it and then act as if some obscure, independent, hard-to-reach creator is the core reason why Australia is stopping itself from accessing the critical national security measures it needs with these partnerships. We have been polite about this for long enough, but if this doesn’t describe self-interested blackmail, I don’t know what does.
Sure, it’s big tech’s decision where they choose to invest in training infrastructure, and that’s their value to offer. Knowing what their value is, is our strength – but knowing what our value is, is our superpower.
Australia's creative industries contribute more than $63.7 billion annually in direct value, and music alone generated $10.76 billion in revenue and $4.28 billion in direct gross value added in 2024–25. That value is renewable: Australian artists and the small businesses around them generate it again every year. It is an asset class in which Australia already holds world-class, export-earning strength and it is owned here. This is our existing sovereign capability.
What’s extra frustrating about this whole debacle is that even the most conservative tech and AI supporters are conceding that Australia has no realistic path to building its own frontier AI, and that no matter what we bargain with, we will be beholden to Washington, who can switch off our access at any moment.
If the PM doesn’t want our country to be, in his words, just “a data warehouse for AI products made overseas”, then he and his caucus must see sense on this matter urgently, for it is “plain as day”.
Please, Australian Government: HOLD. THE. LINE.
