Artists line up to defend intellectual property against AI
‘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,’ said author Thomas Keneally.
Some of Australia’s more notable creatives made an impassioned defence of their intellectual property rights in the face of lobbying by artificial intelligence-producing tech companies and the Productivity Commission “considering” their case.
The commission in August said it was “considering whether there is a case for a new fair dealing exception that explicitly covers text and data mining”.
Thomas Keneally, the man behind Schindler’s Ark, accused AI companies of “theft” and revealed that 79 of his books had been in a collection of more than 191,000 pirated books used to train some generative AI systems.
“This is not a victimless crime,” Keneally said, quoting his daughter, also a novelist. “You have stolen our early mornings and late evenings. You have stolen the time we in turn have stolen from our loved ones to make a book.”
Keneally put forcefully: “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.”
Rapper Adam Briggs said technology and AI “shouldn’t be at the cost of the integrity of the art and the artist … Our art and work should be valued and protected.”
A text and data mining exception has long been on the wishlist of tech companies and has only moved higher on the list since the explosion of AI into public consciousness, given it would allow companies to bypass copyright rules and scrape vast amounts of data to feed into algorithm training sets.
Liberal senator Sarah Henderson and Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young blasted the PC for considering the exception.
“In this report, you wave a white flag in terms of protecting the copyright of artists in this country,” Senator Henderson said.
“This is not the position of the Productivity Commission,” commissioner Julie Abramson said.
“We have an open mind on this. We are consulting on it. We think creative industries are very important, and we’ve done previous work in this area.
“As (commissioner Stephen King) indicated, this was an example of where we were looking at:, is the current law fit for purpose?”
Multiple bodies testified at the hearing that they had not been consulted by the Productivity Commission prior to the interim report’s publication.
Senator Sarah Hanson-Young said she was “gobsmacked” that the PC published the report “without doing their homework”.
“It is quite clear this report issued by the commission in August is now not worth the paper it’s printed on,” she said.
“The recommendations or the key questions they believe need to be answered and fixed have no basis in the evidence and they have simply ignored the key sector, a $68bn sector in this country.
“That’s our creative industries, our artists, our journalists, our news companies. They have been totally left out of the equation.
“I am calling on the Productivity Commission today to withdraw that particular section of their report. It’s been discredited, it’s been shown to be absolute garbage, it has no basis in reality.”
The Australian’s literary editor also presented evidence at the hearing, as part of the Australian Society of Authors.
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