APRA AMCOS, the Australian music rights body, wants existing copyright enforced against US trained AI models; the Tech Council of Australia says it wants a ‘fair’ path too.
The Australian authors and musicians who crowded into Parliament House on Wednesday are not asking the courts for a remedy. They are asking the government to collect.
That shift, away from litigation and toward regulatory leverage, is the structural story underneath the Parliament House press conference on 1 July 2026. Australian creators cannot meaningfully sue the frontier AI companies whose models were trained in the United States, and they have said they will not try. So they are turning the federal government into a royalty-collection proxy. Whether that works depends on what Canberra is willing to do to copyright that has effectively been exported along with the data.
At the center of the room sat author Anna Funder, flanked by children's writer Andy Griffiths, musicians and industry figures, as cross-coverage in Brisbane confirmed. The demand was specific: tech firms must ask permission and pay royalties for using Australian creative work to train AI models, under existing copyright law. The government must also keep refusing the kind of "text and data mining" carve-out that European regulators have entertained, and must actively push back on Silicon Valley lobbying for one.
"Scraping," in plain terms, means collecting books, articles, lyrics and other creative work from the open web so it can be fed into the large language models that power chatbots and image generators. Australia has not legalized that practice. The Attorney-General's department ruled out a text-and-data-mining exception in October 2025, meaning scraping remains infringement unless the creator has licensed the work. Creators say legal clarity is not enough without enforcement.
Funder framed her situation in property terms. "They moved into my flats, kicked me out, and are charging rent for my work," she said, casting herself as a "victim of crime." Griffiths offered a number to scale the problem: 43 of his books have been scraped without permission, 67 if you count translations. When derivative works are pulled in alongside originals, the scraping is industrial rather than incidental.
The industry counter-position arrived almost immediately. The Tech Council of Australia, chaired by Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar, said it wants a path that lets domestic AI development happen "in the national interest" while ensuring fair outcomes for creators. APRA AMCOS, the Australian music rights body, has taken a harder line. Chief executive Dean Ormston said government should not mediate deals but should actively resist carve-out lobbying, per the Guardian's reporting on the press conference. He noted the heavy US tech-lobbyist traffic through Canberra Airport.
The reason courts are off the table explains the strategy. Frontier AI models are typically trained in the United States, beyond the reach of Australian judges. The clearest recent evidence came in September 2025, when Anthropic agreed to a US$1.5 billion settlement in a class-style US copyright case. Funder was part of the plaintiff group. Her share, she told the press conference, was about US$3,000. Even successful US litigation produces a per-author payout that no Australian creator can build a career on, and most will not even reach the US courtroom.
The institutional channel for the campaign is the Attorney-General's Copyright and AI Reference Group, the standing forum set up after the October 2025 ruling. Creators are pressing it to move from advisory to action, and Australian legal analysis has framed the next step as the live question. On a related front, Senator David Pocock has separately labelled a reported A$50 billion datacentre proposal the "ultimate dirty deal," tying the infrastructure side of the AI build-out to the same copyright fight. If a project of that scale is signed off, the question of who pays creators for the inputs becomes harder to defer.
The test is whether Canberra treats the existing copyright law as something to enforce, including against foreign model providers, or whether the October 2025 ruling stays on the books as a statement of principle with no follow-through. The artists in the room have made a calculated bet that political pressure beats litigation. The first indicator will be whether the Copyright and AI Reference Group produces a mechanism, or another consultation.