Big tech companies are asking for Australian copyright laws to be watered down, to allow them to scrape Australian output – including journalism, music and books – in order to improve their AI models.
Guardian Australia this week reported on an industry proposal under which companies would commit more than $50bn in investment in datacentres and set up a $350m fund to compensate creatives in exchange for weaker copyright laws. Senator David Pocock has described it as the “ultimate dirty deal”.
The Albanese government has insisted it has no plans to weaken copyright protections, after ruling out the potential text and data mining exemption last year – but creatives are sounding the alarm. Loudest among them this week are musicians, some of whom discovered last month that their work was already being scraped.
Albanese is known for his love of Australian music. Guardian Australia spoke to some of his favourite bands to hear what they had to say to him.
