Labor’s Leaked AI Copyright Deal Sparks Creator Backlash after Senator David Pocock tabled departmental screenshots in the Senate on Tuesday. The paper, titled “AI on Australian Terms,” is still a consultation draft. It is not law. Creators say the direction already breaks a promise the prime minister made in July.
What the leaked paper actually says
Attorney-General Michelle Rowland’s department put two paths to rights-holder groups this month.
One path would let AI firms strike voluntary deals with collecting societies and large rights holders, then get a wider legal right to train on the “long tail” of unprotected online work. That tail is the mass of posts, photos, small sites and one-off tracks that no company will ever license one by one.
The other path, often called Option B, would require a minimum number of commercial deals first. After that threshold, the firms would get statutory permission to train on anything that is not digitally locked. Rights holders who want out would have to opt out, including by using tools such as robots.txt. Industry groups say those flags are ignored by many scrapers and can also hide work from search. Rights groups say a social post would then be controlled by the platform, not the person who wrote it.
Either way, the default flips. Today an AI company generally needs permission to copy Australian work for training. The drafts put the burden on the owner to say no.
Why artists say it breaks Albanese’s line
On July 15 at the University of Sydney, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said no company should use Australian books, music, art or news to train AI without the artist’s control of price and value. “Anything less is theft,” he said.
Pocock said Wednesday that Labor was “throwing creators under the bus” to chase data-centre money. Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young called the opt-out a “cop out.” Former industry minister Ed Husic said the drafts undermine the July speech. Former competition chair Rod Sims, who built the news media bargaining code, warned the options favour the platforms and leave small creators unpaid. Australian Writers Guild chief Claire Pullen said members already lose jobs to machines that imitate their work. APRA AMCOS chief Dean Ormston said musicians fear their rights will be traded for investment headlines. Author Anna Funder said the government has absorbed “false presumptions” from the firms.
The leak landed in the same news cycle as OpenAI executives telling ministers that Australian copyright rules block local model training, and as Queensland announced Anthropic’s first Australian data-centre lease. Training a model and running a chat service from a hall in the Darling Downs are not the same job. The copyright fight is about the first one. The lease does not prove a trade.
What the other side wants
OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Meta have told Canberra they need legal certainty before they spend on training kit here. Coalition figures this week urged a deal by year’s end and framed delay as a security problem. Shadow attorney-general Michaelia Cash called the opt-out “a text and data mining exception with an opt-out bolted on,” the carve-out she says Labor had ruled out. That is her charge, not a court finding. The government says talks continue and nothing is locked. Rowland’s office has not published a final model.
Collecting societies want commercial deals first and strong law behind them. Copyright Agency chief Josephine Johnston said any framework must bring tech to the table without leaving Australian creators behind.
What happens next
Labor’s Leaked AI Copyright Deal Sparks Creator Backlash because the drafts try to solve a real licensing mess by shrinking the class of people who get a cheque. Big catalogues can sit in a pool. Family photos, small blogs and unsigned tracks become free training data unless someone knows how to opt out.
The document is a consultation paper, not a bill. Albanese can still keep the July line. The Senate now has the screenshots. Artists want a public ruling that opt-out is off the table. The companies want a statute they can take to a board. Until one of those arrives, every new data-centre announcement will be read against the same file. They are not the same decision.
