News Corp boss Michael Miller slams AI copyright ‘theft’
In a speech to Melbourne Press Club this week, Michael Miller will warn that any watering down of copyright laws could wreak havoc on our cultural sovereignty.
The voracious and harmful cash grab by big tech companies in the early days of the digital revolution could be repeated – to the serious detriment of Australian media companies and the nation’s content creators – if local copyright laws are relaxed.
In a speech to the Melbourne Press Club this week titled The Big Steal, News Corp Australasia executive chairman Michael Miller will issue the dire warning about the consequences of the push by artificial intelligence-producing tech companies to scrape vast amounts of data to feed into algorithm training sets without fairly compensating the companies, journalists and artists who own the intellectual property of the content.
“This new (AI) era must not enshrine the ‘wild wild web’ all over again and it is vital the sovereign nations assert their right to decide how this technology plays out in their own societies,” Mr Miller will say.
The News Corp boss’s caution follows the release in August of an interim report by the Productivity Commission that put forward a proposal to give big tech companies access to an expansive library of copyrighted Australian content.
The PC report called for feedback on the idea of a “fair dealing exception” that would allow AI companies to engage in “text and data mining” – automated analysis of large volumes of text and data to identify patterns – that would be used in the training of AI models.
Under such a scenario, owners of the copyrighted material subject to text and data mining would not be compensated for the harvesting and use of the content by the big tech industry.
The PC report found while the full effects of AI on the nation’s productivity were still uncertain, AI “will likely add more than $116bn to Australian economic activity over the next decade”. The report encourages further exploration of “whether current Australian copyright law is a barrier to building and training AI models”.
In his speech on Wednesday, Mr Miller will warn that any watering down of our copyright laws could wreak havoc on Australia’s cultural sovereignty, and he will urge the government – and fellow media companies – to learn from the unknowing mistakes made a generation ago when big tech companies were allowed to exploit content created by media companies and artists for free.
“Those who believe we should blindly now surrender our intellectual property to large language models in the same way we surrendered it to search and social cannot be allowed to take us for fools all over again,” he will say.
“We shouldn’t be asked to opt out of their regime that legitimises theft; they should be opting into our existing system that legitimises fair play and fair negotiation.”
The Tech Council of Australia has been one of the most vocal supporters of changes to copyright laws.
In July, Tech Council chair and Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar called on the federal government to loosen copyright laws to include “fair use” and text and data mining exemptions, saying the move would unblock “billions of dollars” of foreign investment and ensure Australia gained a big slice of the AI boom.
Last week, several artists from the arts industry, including authors Thomas Keneally and Anna Funder and Indigenous rapper Adam Briggs, fronted a Senate hearing to defend their rights to retain control over their intellectual property.
“It is copyright. It’s not copy charity. It’s not copy privilege. It’s not copy indulgence. It’s copyright. And our right has been parleyed away by ignorant people who don’t realise what copyright is,” Keneally told the hearing on Tuesday.
Other artists and industry representatives testified that they had not been consulted by the PC prior to the interim report’s publication.
News Corp is the publisher of The Australian.
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