Numerous rights organisations, representing musicians, songwriters, and authors, have teamed up to issue a joint statement against a teachers’ union after the union argued for a copyright exemption in schools.
The joint statement comes from local creator groups including AMPAL, APRA AMCOS, ARIA PPCA, Australian Publishers Association, Australian Society of Authors, Australian Writers' Guild, AWG Authorship Collecting Society, Copyright Agency and Screenrights. Together, they’re claiming that “education giants” are seeking a “midnight raid” on creator rights.
The organisations representing creators argue that Australian “authors, songwriters, recording artists, visual artists, photographers, illustrators, playwrights, screenwriters and producers” are being targeted by Australia’s most powerful education bureaucracies.
They allege that state and territory education departments, as well as private schools, are pushing to expand copyright exceptions in schools—all while a taxpayer-funded lobby backs them.
In October, the Federal Government ruled out a proposed text-and-data-mining exception in the Copyright Act following backlash from artists and music industry groups.
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The decision arrived after the Productivity Commission’s interim report, Harnessing Data and the Digital Economy, was published last August. The report became controversial within the arts sector after suggesting that Australia grant an exemption to Australia’s copyright laws that would allow technology companies free access to Australian art to train AI models.
All of which leads us to today, when the Copyright Advisory Group (CAG), which is staffed by government lawyers and represents the “combined weight” of each state and territory government and every major private, Catholic and independent school in Australia, is seeking concessions that the Government so recently ruled out.
“The intent of the Bill was clear: To confirm that an existing exception allowing copyright material to be used in classrooms without payment applies equally in online settings,” the joint statement from local creator groups reads.
It continues, “The Explanatory Memorandum is explicit, and the amendments were not intended to touch existing licensing arrangements. The Senate inquiry agreed, recommending the Bill pass as drafted. But now, the education sector wants more.”
The creative rights protection organisations say the answer to schools’ use and sharing of content is “not to take money from some of the lowest-paid workers in the country.”
“For just under $30 per student per year, every student in every Australian school has access to everything ever created, every book ever written, virtually every song ever recorded, every image ever published, every article, every poem, every illustration, every play, every documentary or film ever made and every screenplay,” the statement continues. “Not a curated subset. Not a limited catalogue. Everything.”
This means that, according to the artist rights’ groups, teachers can copy said content, then share it and stream it across classrooms in any format, “without seeking permission and without paying a cent beyond that flat annual fee. By any measure, it is one of the most comprehensive and accessible education licences anywhere in the world.”
The local creator rights groups also stated that this isn’t the first time they’ve come into a dispute with the education lobby.
“The same arguments were deployed in 2016,” the creator rights groups said. “They resurfaced during COVID-19, when the same lobby sought to use the pandemic as cover. They are now being run again, in perfect step with big tech's push to weaken creator protections in the development of Artificial Intelligence.
“The timing, each time, is not coincidental. The target, each time, is the same. The earnings of artists and creators who have no comparable institutional power, no government funding, and no capacity to absorb further cuts to their income.”
They continued, “The author whose book is being copied, the songwriter and recording artist whose work is being streamed in a classroom, the filmmaker and television creators whose work inspires, the illustrator whose images fill the curriculum already provide access for a sum that would not buy a single textbook or a school uniform shirt.
“Asking creators to carry costs that are not theirs to bear is not progress. It is cost-shifting dressed up as principle.”
AMPAL, APRA AMCOS, ARIA PPCA and the remaining creator groups concluded that they would continue to “oppose any expansion of copyright exceptions,” whether it’s in Copyright Amendment bills, the CAIRG process or in any future reform. They remain steadfast in protecting “the already modest incomes” of Australian creatives and defending any moves that would undermine licensing frameworks.
