Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has vowed to protect Australian writers, musicians, artists and journalists, saying they “must retain ownership and control of their work. Our laws will spell that out plain as day.”
In his speech on AI, delivered at the University of Sydney, he said:
no company should use Australian books, music, art or news to build or train AI without the artist’s control. That includes the artist’s control of the price and value of their work […] Anything less, is theft
The best way, he said, to secure the strongest copyright protections for Australian artists was “for Australia to be active and involved”. But while these are strong words, he did not spell out what action his government would take. Meanwhile, creators are already having their work plundered.
How will his government legislate to protect Australian ownership of Australian work? Will it act on thefts that have already taken place?
What could be done
There are two main courses of action the federal government can pursue to protect Australian creators’ work. One is legislative and the other is legal.
In Australia, unlike other jurisdictions, copyright is automatic for Australian creators and covered by the 1968 Copyright Act. There have been relatively few updates to this legislation, despite major changes in technology.
For example, loading content such as books into AI is often a breach of copyright, but it is common practice, including among university students.
It would be possible to amend the legislation to allow uploads, so long as creators received payment for the associated training the large language model (LLM) gains from the upload. This could work in a similar way to the system where copyright holders receive payment when their work is used in student readers.
Some arts groups are “encouraged” by Albanese’s speech. The Australian Society of Authors chair, Jennifer Mills commended the government
for sticking to its principles and seeing the value of Australian authors and Australian stories. Our rights as creators must be defended. Now big tech needs to come to the table and accept the facts.
The problem is that AI companies effectively have all the licence they need to breach Australian copyright, since no coordinated action is underway to address the existing scraping of Australian copyright material to train LLMs such as ChatGPT or Claude.
This is not for lack of evidence. In 2025, the Atlantic published an online database of works that had been scraped by AI companies. Local authors were quick to discover their works had been a part of that process.
Taking action against multinational companies is not new ground in Australia. To name just one recent example, attorney-general Michelle Rowland announced the government would sue US manufacturer 3M over its use of forever chemicals.
Such lawsuits are a reminder that powerful tech companies are not beyond answering for their actions. The federal government could, for instance, launch a lawsuit against a tech company on behalf of creators whose copyright has been breached.
Lawsuits are happening in other countries. In the US, publishers have just launched a lawsuit against Google, alleging it has illegally copied works to train its Gemini AI product.
The theft continues
No other country, said Albanese, had “got it right” in protecting creators “when it comes to AI training”. Australia will “build the best possible solution for ourselves”.
But any claims that Australia is “active and involved” are little more than hot air without action on the existing thefts of Australian material and a program for compensation. The latter could potentially take the form of an agreement brokered between the government and tech companies to pay creators for work that has been used in LLM training.
It’s worth remembering, too, that there is already a body looking after copyright payments for Australian writers. Under current arrangements, Australians registered with the Copyright Agency receive a payment based on a survey it conducts determining how many times their work has been copied without recompense. This covers school and university readers and government use.
At the moment, there is no such payment from any AI company as compensation for the work these companies have used to train LLMs. There is no reason why this agency could not be involved with the development of a new system to tackle AI companies.
While Australia might self-identify as a small or relatively insignificant country, federal legislation, from the media bargaining code to the under-16 social media ban (leaving to one side deliberations on its efficacy), is making us a world leader on some tech issues.
And while there is hot air on copyright, the government has promised to “speed up approvals” on data centres. The imbalance is clear: data centres are getting support and copyright creators are not.
Alice Grundy is Managing Editor of Australia Institute Press, and a Visiting Fellow of the School of Literature, Language and Linguistics at ANU.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
