“We have copyright laws,” said arts minister Tony Burke last week. “We have no plans, no intention, no appetite to be weakening those copyright laws based on this draft report that’s floating around.”
He was referring to the Productivity Commission’s controversial floating of a text and data mining exception to the Australian Copyright Act, which would make it legal to train artificial intelligence (AI) large language models, such as ChatGPT, on copyrighted Australian work.
In the internet age, all that is solid melts into data, easily copied and distributed instantly across the internet. This includes the work of authors, songwriters and artists, ostensibly protected by the law of copyright.
