APRA AMCOS applauds Prime Minister Albanese’s unequivocal support for Australia’s creators and welcomes new Office of AI

APRA AMCOS applauds Prime Minister Albanese’s clear and unequivocal support for Australia’s artists, creators and copyright holders with his landmark speech on the future of AI in Australia today.

“The Prime Minister has made it clear. The future of AI development in Australia must respect creator rights, that permission and payment must be sought, and crucially, the creative economy must benefit from AI innovation and development in Australia,” said APRA AMCOS Chief Executive Dean Ormston.

APRA AMCOS also welcomed the Prime Minister's announcement of a new Office of AI as a renewed opportunity to convert government certainty on copyright into a licensing framework built on consent and payment that delivers for Australia and its creative economy.

“We commend the Prime Minister for bringing coordinated national leadership to AI policy, and we commend the Attorney-General for holding a clear, principled line that there will be no copyright exception for AI training. We also commend the Minister for Industry and Assistant Minister for Digital Economy for their continued leadership on sustainable and world leading AI development in Australia.

"The Prime Minister and the Attorney-General have given this country consistent certainty that Australian copyright will be respected. This has been reinforced again today. The opportunity now is to use the Office of AI to turn that certainty into serious industry-to-industry licensing negotiations between platforms and rights holders, not further rounds of tech sector avoidance," Mr Ormston said.

"The Office of AI must seriously interrogate the numbers AI platforms are putting on the table. It must also ensure that the value of Australian creative works and intellectual property, which is the fuel AI is built on, is seen as an integral, appreciating national asset in its own right, not a line item to be settled quickly and cheaply.

"Selling off copyright cheap to a platform that might not even be operating in this country in a few years would sell out the nation's IP wealth generation. Our artists and creators will still be here, still creating, and still building intellectual property wealth for this country long after today's dominant platforms have been overtaken or replaced. That enduring, compounding value is exactly what the Office of AI should be maximising.

“The Office of AI must also take the issue of indigenous cultural intellectual property seriously and put it at the centre of any policy consideration when it comes to the cultural works these platforms want to ingest for their commercial products.

"Anthropic wants Australia to hand over fifteen billion dollars in data centre investment while it continues to argue against paying for the Australian intellectual property it has already trained on. That is not investment, that is a company trying to get its core input for free, and Australian artists and copyright owners should not be expected to subsidise Anthropic's business model.

"Anthropic has already been caught in the United States using pirated copies of copyrighted work to train its models, and paid US$1.5 billion to settle the claim rather than defend the practice. That is not a company asking for time to work through a complex new technology. That is a company with a demonstrated pattern of taking first and paying only when caught. Australia should not be negotiating in good faith with a company that has already shown what it does when it thinks no one is watching.

"They do not want Australia to be the country that proves licensing is possible and reasonable. That is exactly why Australia should not wait for those cases to resolve. We should continue to back our own artists and creators, and let the future wealth this generates for Australia speak for itself,” Dean Ormston said.

APRA AMCOS said it looks forward to working with the Office of AI, the Attorney-General, the Minister for Industry and Assistant Minister Science and the Digital Economy, and industry partners to convert the Government's certainty on copyright into a functioning, paid licensing framework built on consent and payment as quickly as possible.

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