APRA AMCOS has hit back at reports that the Federal Government is considering weakening copyright protections to keep OpenAI investing in Australia.
The Guardian has reported that senior OpenAI representatives met Labor ministers and told them Australia’s copyright settings stop the company training its models here, and that billions of dollars of local investment depend on that changing. The ABC has reported a leaked government copyright proposal that would flip the arrangement so creators have to opt out of AI training by default.
APRA AMCOS chief executive Dean Ormston said not one multinational AI platform operating in Australia has approached the organisation about a training licence in nearly four years.
“We have licensed music in this country for 100 years and very little of it came easily. Commercial radio, television, streaming services, the digital platforms. Every one of them argued with us, several fought us for years, and some of it was settled in court,” Ormston said. “That is how a price gets set, and it has always ended in the same place. A licence is built, and money reaches the people who wrote the songs.”
“Australian intellectual property and copyright is one of the few inputs in this build that Australia actually owns. The chips are imported. The models are foreign owned. Investment that is conditional on a country rewriting its property law is not investment.”
Most of the industry had taken this as settled, because the Government ruled out a text and data mining exception in October last year, and in July the Prime Minister told an audience at the University of Sydney that no company should use Australian books, music, art or news to build or train AI without the artist’s control, and that anything less is theft.
Ormston wants the Government to put a value on Australian intellectual property before it sits down with any AI developer, and says the offer of a licensing negotiation has been open since 2023.
The same copyright framework is what venues licence through when they pay APRA and PPCA, and it is the pipe that carries money back to the writers whose songs get played on your stages.
