By Elias Visontay and Brittany Busch
One of the nation’s biggest news publishers says it has been the victim of illegal “scraping” by AI giants, as media companies praised the Albanese government for quashing a proposal to grant tech firms an exemption from copyright laws so they could freely mine media firms’ content to train their models.
On Monday, media companies and the nation’s creative sector welcomed a commitment from Attorney-General Michelle Rowland to rule out a proposal floated by the Productivity Commission in August to give AI companies an exemption to scrape locally copyrighted work to train large language models.
Attorney-General Michelle Rowland called for the tech and creative sectors to come together to support innovation while compensating creators.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
A spokesperson for Nine Entertainment, owner of this masthead, said that “by acting decisively, the Australian government has set a clear marker to big tech that our ideas, our intellectual property, our national voice in this world is not free to swipe, ingest and grow their models at our expense”.
“Nine has experienced first-hand just how active this illegal scraping of our journalism has become, with no way of knowing exactly what it is being used for,” the spokesperson said. “The one thing we do know is that if it’s valuable enough for them to steal it, then it’s right they be made to pay for it.”
While the comments from Nine did not accuse a specific tech company of theft, they come days after Google’s controversial new AI Mode falsely named an innocent graphic designer from one of Nine’s outlets, The Sydney Morning Herald, as the man who confessed to abducting and murdering three-year-old Cheryl Grimmer more than 50 years ago.
Unable to find a reported name for the accused killer, Google’s AI Mode appeared to have latched onto the designer’s name instead, given he was credited for an illustration in the article.
Google did not respond to questions about whether the error had occurred because its model had scraped the article, which was behind The Sydney Morning Herald’s paywall, without authorisation.
Separately, News Corp also thanked the government for its stance against an exemption for tech companies. Michael Miller, its Australasia executive chairman, said the announcement “is a welcome catalyst for tech and AI companies to license Australian content”.
“By upholding the creator’s right to control access, terms of use and payment, it reinforces that our copyright law works to ensure effective market outcomes,” he said.
“The announcement secures a sustainable and thriving future for Australia’s culture, news media and creative sectors, guaranteeing that Australian stories will continue to resonate powerfully at home and across the world, which is vital for a robust democracy,” Miller said.
Ruling out the exemption on Monday, Rowland said: “Artificial intelligence presents significant opportunities for Australia and our economy. However, it’s important that Australian creatives benefit from these opportunities, too.
“Australian creatives are not only world-class, but they are also the lifeblood of Australian culture, and we must ensure the right legal protections are in place,” she said.
Rowland stressed that “there are no plans to weaken copyright protections when it comes to AI”, and called for the tech and creative sectors to come together to “find sensible and workable solutions” to support innovation while compensating creators.
The government is convening its copyright and AI reference group over the next two days to discuss how it can encourage fair and legal avenues for using copyright material in AI; to improve certainty on how copyright law applies to material generated through AI; and to make avenues for enforcing lower-value copyright infringement matters less costly to enforce, such as through a new small claims forum.
Heads of Australia’s largest media companies had been vocal in their efforts to lobby the government against the exemption.
Atlassian co-founder and Tech Council of Australia chair Scott Farquhar pushed for AI companies to be allowed to mine data more freely.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer
The backlash to the proposal followed several tech figures, including Atlassian co-founder and Tech Council of Australia chair Scott Farquhar, backing the Productivity Commission’s proposal and calling for legal reforms to allow AI companies to mine data more freely.
A Tech Council spokesperson said on Monday: “The TCA looks forward to participating in the reference group in coming days to help develop a framework which we hope will deliver certainty for AI training as well as for artists and creators”.
Rowland, speaking to ABC Radio on Monday morning, defended the months taken to reassure creators after the Productivity Commission suggested AI mining be exempt from the copyright rules.
“We are making it very clear that we will not be entertaining [an] … exception,” she said.
“This is fundamental to their right as people who are generating works to ensure that they are fairly remunerated for that and that there are fair terms of use.”
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