Musicians and authors are gathering at Parliament House in Canberra on Wednesday to push back on a Productivity Commission proposal that would let AI companies train on songs, novels and art without licences.
Australian musicians and authors have a number they want you to remember: zero. That is how many AI copyright lawsuits have been filed in Australian courts, even as hundreds of commercial licensing deals have been signed between publishers, labels and AI companies elsewhere, and as hundreds of related cases work through courts in other jurisdictions. On Wednesday, a group of them will gather at Parliament House in Canberra to press the federal government not to change the rule that has kept that count where it is.
The fight is not really about whether AI companies should train on Australian songs, novels and paintings. Most artists accept that some training is inevitable. It is about the default rule. Under Australia's existing copyright system, AI companies that want to use creative works must negotiate a licence, just as they would with a newspaper or a record label. A proposal from the Productivity Commission would change that by carving out a broad text-and-data-mining (TDM) exception, a legal pathway that lets AI systems read and learn from copyright-protected material without permission, unless the rights-holder explicitly opts out.
In opt-in systems, the burden is on the AI company to come to a deal. In opt-out systems, the works are fair game until the creator says otherwise. The Australian artists heading to Parliament, among them Mark Seymour, William Barton, Paul Dempsey, Mahalia Barnes, Anna Funder and Andy Griffiths, are asking the federal government to keep the country on the opt-in side.
"The current copyright framework is working," APRA AMCOS's Nicholas Pickard told the Maitland Mercury. "These companies haven't had a single knock on the door from any AI platform to even investigate what a licensing arrangement might look like."
The Productivity Commission's interim report on data and digital technology, released on 5 August 2025, recommended a broad TDM exception as part of a wider package of data-access reforms. The idea is to make it easier for AI developers and researchers to train on the open web without negotiating with every author and musician. The commission framed it as pro-innovation. Australian rights-holders, including the country's major collecting societies, have framed it as a giveaway.
The federal government has so far held the middle. In October 2025, the Albanese government publicly ruled out a blanket AI copyright exemption for tech companies. That position, Greens senator David Pocock said in June, was quietly being walked back through narrower carve-outs. Pocock accused the government of "sleepwalking" into an AI copyright "tech bro free-for-all." A senior minister, according to ABC News, called that "reckless speculation."
That debate is now being mediated through the Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Reference Group (CAIRG), a multi-stakeholder forum convened by the Attorney-General's Department. CAIRG is the venue where the technical design of any new exception will be argued out, and where the difference between opt-in and opt-out will be settled.
What the artists heading to Parliament are asking for is not new law. It is the recognition that the existing system already works. APRA AMCOS and other collecting societies already license music and text for a wide range of commercial uses. The Atlantic's recently released dataset search tool, which lets creators check whether their works have been scraped into AI training corpora, has surfaced millions of songs, novels and artworks, including Australian ones, harvested without licences. Several of those works belong to artists named at Wednesday's gathering.
For the rights-holders, that asymmetry is the point. If the default rule flips to opt-out, AI platforms would no longer need to seek licences or pay for them. They would simply need to honour take-down requests from individual creators, who would have to discover the use first. That is the negotiating position the Productivity Commission's proposal, in its current form, would create.
Pocock's framing is partisan. It is also precise on the mechanism: a TDM exception without meaningful consent or remuneration, he argues, removes the default rule that has kept Australian creators at the table.
The Productivity Commission is due to deliver its final report later this year. What happens after that, whether the government accepts the TDM recommendation, narrows it to research-only uses, or routes the question through a paid-licensing scheme, will determine whether Australia remains the AI copyright outlier its artists say they want it to be.