TRANSCRIPT:
In a victory for Australian creators, the Albanese government is definitively ruling out giving tech giants free rein to mine creative content for training Artificial Intelligence models.
The Australian Recording Industry Association's chief executive Anna Bell has told the ABC that it was a "critical step in the right direction."
"The government has stood up and backed in copyright law as well as artists, creators and rights holders. And basically what they're saying is we will not agree to dilute and weaken our copyright laws so that a small number of very large tech companies can have free and open access to very important and valuable cultural works."
Requested by sections of the tech sector, the so-called “text and mining” exemption was floated by the productivity commission in their August interim report into harnessing data and digital technology.
The report suggested that AI could boost the economy by $116 billion over a decade.
But the proposal faced immediate denunciation from the creative sector and the Australian Council of Trade Unions, who argued it would give tech giants a "free pass" for the rampant theft of creative work, and deprive Australian artists of valuable income.
Environment Minister Murray Watt says that's not what the government wants.
"The Albanese Government are a strong supporter of our arts community and we recognise that they deserve their fair share for their efforts in producing product, as do media organisations. One of the things that we know about AI is that while it can produce enormous productivity gains and many benefits for us on a personal level, we also need to have proper safeguards in place to make sure that in this case artists, media organisations, creatives get their fair share from their work and that's why we will not be providing an exemption for what's known as text and data mining for AI companies."
Tom Sulston from Digital Rights Watch has told SBS that while the government's decision to scrap the text and data mining exemption is welcome, it doesn't go far enough.
He argues that protections shouldn't stop with professional creatives but must be extended to cover all Australians' social media content, private information, and biometric data.
"Sure at the moment, the AI companies are able to ingest content from social media without gathering the consent of the people who have written it. Most social media companies will have a Terms of Use that essentially say anything you put into their system they can do whatever they want with. And we don't think that is sufficient. As individuals, we still control that data, so it's important that we're allowed to say, I don't want this to be part of an AI training thing or used for something that I don't want it to be used for. And then similarly, our personal and private information is also up for grabs by AI companies."
Mr Sulston says that while Australian's browse the internet, the private data they generate can be used by big tech for anything from profiling to targeted ads.
Calling this a "huge power imbalance," he argues that it leaves citizens little control over their own lives, proposing a change in privacy law to address the issue.
"So we're calling for a right to delete provision in the upcoming Privacy Act review that will allow us to say, hey, you know, I gave a company some data because we were doing, you know, some business together, and now I want to revoke that permission, and they are not allowed to use my data for whatever other purposes they might be putting it to."
While the government is completely ruling out a "text and data mining" exemption, Federal Attorney-General Michelle Rowland has told the ABC that the work is not over.
Instead, the 'reconstituted copyright and AI reference group' is convening to determine the path forward.
Ms Rowland says that while Australia’s Copyright Act is 'robust,' it must also accommodate the challenges of AI.
"So for example, those fair legal avenues for copyright use, whether there should be, for example, a new collective licensing framework, or should there be a voluntary framework improving the certainty about how Copyright applies to material that might be generated by an Australian creator utilizing AI. But one of the key aspects that has come up in the past few months is around enforcement, so the potential for a small claims forum as an option to better address especially those lower value copyright infringement matters so it doesn't take the vast amounts of time and money in order to enforce one's legal rights."
