As the government weighs a copyright exemption for AI companies, more than 7,000 Australian songwriters, authors and screenwriters are demanding Parliament hold the line — and the outcome could reshape how AI companies access Australian creative work.
An Australian creative coalition led by the Australasian music rights body APRA AMCOS walked into Parliament House in Canberra on Wednesday with an open letter signed by more than 7,000 songwriters, authors, photographers and screenwriters, and a clear ask: keep copyright protections intact for the next phase of artificial-intelligence training.
The delegation met Arts minister Tony Burke to deliver the letter, which is co-signed by the Australian Music Publishers Association, the Australian Publishers Association, the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA), the Australian Society of Authors, Screenrights, Screen Producers Australia, the Copyright Agency, the Australian Music Centre and the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Music Office (AdNews; The Guardian Australia).
Underneath the open letter sits a more specific fight the campaign is plainly aimed at. Guardian Australia reported on Tuesday that the Albanese government is weighing a cabinet proposal that would exempt AI companies from copyright liability for text-and-data mining (TDM, the wholesale scanning of books, scripts, lyrics and articles used to train AI models) in exchange for an Australian data-centre build-out worth more than A$50 billion and an A$350-million-a-year artist fund (The Guardian Australia). Guardian attributes the leak to information provided to independent senator David Pocock; the Prime Minister's office has not confirmed any such deal, and Attorney-General Michelle Rowland's spokesperson told the paper the government has "no plans to weaken copyright protections" for AI.
If the leak is accurate, the deal would amount to a sharp reversal. In October 2025, Labor publicly ruled out a TDM exemption after a backlash from creators and media companies (The Guardian Australia). The cabinet arithmetic has since shifted: Ed Husic, the former industry minister who pushed for stronger AI guardrails, was dumped from cabinet in 2025 and replaced by Tim Ayres, described as favouring a lighter-touch approach. Anthony Albanese reportedly met with representatives of Anthropic, the US AI company behind the Claude model, last week (The Guardian Australia). Pocock has told the paper he expects a major AI and data-centre announcement "on or about 15 July"; that timing is the senator's claim, not a confirmed government schedule.
The creators are not waiting on the announcement. The campaign's framing is that Australian work has been used "without consent or payment" to train AI models, the letter's own phrase, carried on the federal parliament's e-petitions page and on a separate sign-on page (e-petition EN6054; CyberDaily). APRA AMCOS chief executive Dean Ormston names Midnight Oil, Sia, Crowded House, Lorde and Yothu Yindi as works whose catalogues are in play (AdNews). On the open letter itself are songwriters and performers including Paul Dempsey of Something for Kate, Holly Rankin (who records as Jack River), William Barton, Warren H. Williams, Mahalia Barnes, Mark Seymour, Andy Griffiths, KLP, Francois Tetaz and John Collins, alongside author Anna Funder (AdNews).
The campaign has also built in a First Nations argument that complicates any exemption. Leah Flanagan, APRA AMCOS's director of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander programs, frames AI training on Indigenous recordings as a potential infringement of Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP), a body of community-held rights that sit alongside ordinary copyright, and argues that any government response "must be developed with First Nations communities" (AdNews). The point matters because ICIP is recognised in cultural-policy practice but is not the same thing as the copyright statute a TDM carve-out would actually amend.
The next live deadline is the National Cultural Policy, the federal framework that sets the government's cultural priorities; Burke is the minister responsible for the next iteration, and the open letter is framed as direct input into that process (Brisbane Times; AdNews). What to watch: whether the cabinet proposal Pocock described is confirmed, watered down or quietly dropped before the PM's mid-July AI speech, and whether the TDM question is dealt with inside the National Cultural Policy or, as a slice of the petition's supporters are demanding, kept out of cultural policy entirely and fought on the copyright statute.