Australian authors challenge Productivity Commission's proposed copyright law exemption for AI
Authors Danielle Clode, Rhett Davis and Kate Kruimink are concerned about the effects of proposed changes to copyright law. (ABC Arts: Christian Harimanow)
In short:
The arts sector has condemned the Productivity Commission's proposal to permit tech companies to use copyrighted material to train AI under fair use.
Critics say a copyright exception for AI would harm authors financially and reduce productivity in the creative industries.
What's next?
The Australian Society of Authors (ASA) and Writing Australia are calling on the government to introduce regulation to ensure copyright holders are compensated for the use of their work.
Australian authors are furious over a recent Productivity Commission (PC) interim report that says AI could deliver a $116 billion boost to Australia's economy over the next 10 years.
The centrepiece of the report was a proposal to implement a text and data mining (TDM) exception to the Copyright Act, which would permit tech companies to use copyrighted work to train AI.
In July, former Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar made a similar suggestion in his address to the National Press Club, arguing that a TDM exception could "unlock billions of dollars of investment in Australia".
However, the PC report, Harnessing data and digital technology, has attracted strong criticism from the writing industry.
Lucy Hayward, CEO of the Australian Society of Authors (ASA), said the proposal gave "a free pass" to multinational tech companies, such as Google, Meta and OpenAI, to continue using unauthorised copyrighted material to train their AI models.
"Why should we create a situation where billion-dollar tech companies can profit off authors' work, but not the creators who made the work? It's an entirely absurd proposition," Hayward told ABC Arts.
While the government has yet to deliver a formal response to the interim report, Arts Minister Tony Burke stated that the unauthorised use of copyrighted material for commercial purposes constituted theft.
"We have copyright laws," the minister said in a speech at the 2025 BookUp conference In Sydney.
"We have no plans, no intention, no appetite to be weakening those copyright laws based on this draft report."
Sanctioning an illegal act
Tech companies have already used unauthorised copyrighted material to train AI platforms.
In March, The Atlantic published a tool that made it possible to search the LibGen database, an online trove of pirated books and academic papers that Meta used to train its generative AI language model.
It followed similar revelations in 2023 that a database of pirated material known as Books3 had been used to train Meta's AI model Llama, Bloomberg's BloombergGPT and EleutherAI's GPT-J.
The work of countless Australian authors appeared in the pirated databases, including Charlotte Wood, Tim Winton, Helen Garner and Richard Flanagan.
A TDM exception would allow this type of use of copyrighted material without compensating the author or seeking their consent.
Commissioner Stephen King, one of the report's authors, told ABC RN Breakfast that "not everyone will be a winner".
"There will be people who will lose their jobs because of this technology and those people need to be looked after."
Danielle Clode, the author of non-fiction titles including Koala (2022) and Killers in Eden (2011), fears writers are among those set to lose the most under the proposal.
Danielle Clode says the Productivity Commission has "a long history" of misunderstanding the arts sector. (Supplied: Danielle Clode)
She said the report demonstrated the Productivity Commission's lack of understanding about how the arts sector operated.
"The economic framework they're working with is completely unsuitable for creative industries," she said.
"[It's] not fit-for-purpose. They are asking us to accept wage theft and … for an illegal act to be sanctioned retrospectively, which I think is appalling."
A valuable source of income
Copyright fees are a valuable source of income for authors, who are among the lowest-paid arts workers in Australia, earning just $18,200 on average each year.
"In Australia, we have a very fair and well-regulated copyright system which gives clarity to everybody who uses it," said Clode, who is also a board member of the ASA and the Copyright Agency.
Wenona Byrne, the inaugural director of Writing Australia, said any watering down of copyright laws was a concern for the sector.
"We think the copyright law is fit for purpose. It has sustained the industry since 1968 and has accommodated a lot of technological change in that time," she said.
"We already know that writers earn very little from their creative work … We believe it's fair for writers who have spent the time creating these works, and in some cases, that's decades, to earn an income from their use."
Byrne believes there will always be a readership for Australian stories, but acknowledges writing is not a sustainable career for many authors who hold down multiple jobs to pay the bills.
"There are a whole lot of readers that value Australian authors and the rich and diverse stories they tell," Wenona Byrne says. (Supplied: Creative Australia)
A TDM exception would reduce authors' ability to earn income from their work and expose them to further economic precarity, she warned.
"It would also disincentivise them to create the work in the first place," she said.
"We need a rich culture; we need our contemporary Australian society to be reflected in a variety of works for the page and the stage. Anything that comes to disincentivise that creation is a problem for society as a whole."
An existential threat
Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT pose another, more existential, threat to authors.
"If it's the case that you're able to train these large language models on Australian content, does it mean that it's possible to produce content drawing on all of that material that then replaces work by Australian authors and then they're no longer able to produce work that earns them money?" asked Alice Grundy, a visiting fellow at ANU and the managing editor at Australia Institute Press.
Grundy believes the forecast $116 billion over 10 years is not worth the harm the proposal would cause the arts industry.
"That's not that much money across the whole economy," she said.
"The potential costs to creatives would far outweigh the relatively small economy-wide benefit that they claimed there would be."
She also queries the benefit of a policy that delivers benefits offshore to multinational companies over Australian artists and authors.
"At what point do you say productivity is not worth as much to us as maintaining our culture, as continuing to foster our writers, our artists, our other creators?" Grundy said.
"At what point do … we say that work is less important to us than some extra dollars in the economy?"
Kate Kruimink, whose novel Heartsease won the 2025 Tasmanian Literary Awards Premier's Prize for Fiction, found two of her three books in the LibGen database.
Kate Kruimink works as a teacher and a literary editor alongside her writing career. (Supplied: Kate Kruimink)
She said the unauthorised use of her work had not hurt her economically — yet. She suspects that will change.
"The end result … is going to be that there will be a glut of AI-generated creative works on the market.
"There are always going to be people who care about the human connection and who don't want the AI-created work, especially if it's being created and trained unethically. But at the same time, I think it's going to be so much harder to survive as a creative worker."
Kruimink also questions the Productivity Commission's understanding of the concept of productivity.
"It's not about the productivity of creative workers," she said.
"We can't be productive if our work is being stolen to train the machine that essentially is meant to replace us."
A deeply human endeavour
Geelong writer Rhett Davis, who recently published his second novel, Arborescence, said he would be reluctant to allow his work to be used to train AI when the outcome was a tool that could simulate his writing.
"It seems like a strange kind of deal for me, regardless of how much they pay."
Rhett Davis says the proposed copyright exception for AI "shows a real disconnect with what the arts industry provides this country". (Supplied: Hachette Australia)
He believes compensation for authors should be a basic requirement for the use of their work.
"It shouldn't just be taken for free," he said. "If you're going to use something, there needs to be an agreement to pay for it. It's a pretty basic copyright principle. That is how we continue to make a living as artists."
He is not alone in his view. According to a 2025 study by Macquarie University, 79 per cent of authors would refuse permission for their work to be used to train AI.
Kruimink is another author who, given the choice, would "opt out" from allowing her work to train generative AI, a technology she considers "unethical".
She believes generative AI undermines the meaning of creative work.
"What is creative work for? It's a deeply human endeavour, and to me it's based on the principle of human exchange. The meaning of the work — my writing, for example — is not only in its consumption, it's also in its creation. If you try to cut that exchange in half, I think you remove the soul of what it is."
Opportunity for innovation
ASA CEO Lucy Hayward pushed back against claims that copyright was a barrier to investment and innovation.
"That's absolutely not the case. We know that tech and AI are booming in Australia," she said.
"We're in the top five global destinations for data centres; we're a world leader in quantum computing, Amazon has just invested $20 billion in data centre infrastructure in Australia, so it's not the case that Australian copyright law, which is robust and protects creators, is hindering any kind of innovation and investment."
Lucy Hayward believes a copyright exception for AI would reduce productivity in the creative industries.
Hayward believes the PC report overlooks the economic opportunities licensing arrangements could offer.
"Instead of considering ways to legitimise this theft, why aren't we exploring ways to protect [authors'] rights and ensure that generative AI brings an opportunity to Australian creators and is not simply extracting the value of their content?"
Local creatives — who contribute to the $60 billion arts industry — should not be cut out of the picture, she argues.
"How can we ensure that Australian authors and illustrators who are producing Australian content for Australian audiences can enjoy the financial benefits of the AI boom when their work is vital to the development of this technology?
"Do we really want to give away their intellectual property to multinational tech giants for free so they can continue to enrich themselves and continue extracting value from the Australian economy?
"Or do we want to find a sensible kind of middle ground where we have generative AI tools — they're not going away; there's going to be adoption of AI tools in the workplace — but authors can be reasonably compensated for their vital contribution to the development of the tools?"
Kimberlee Weatherall, a law professor at the University of Sydney and co-director of the Centre for AI, Trust and Governance, told RN Breakfast that AI developers in Australia were constrained by an uncertain regulatory environment.
"If you want to do it legitimately and responsibly, there are very real challenges trying to identify who to license from," she said.
"It may be simply impossible to identify all the copyright owners and get licences from them all; there's no central system for doing so, and if you want to develop AI here in Australia, even if you want to do it purely for research purposes, it's not entirely clear you could do that legitimately under copyright law."
It was a situation in which "everyone loses", she said.
"In an ideal world, we would try to do something very different; we would try to find a way to compromise between these different interests so that you could have local AI development responsibly with some kind of way to recognise the interests of creators."
The next steps
The ASA is calling for the government to reject the PC's proposal and instead implement a licensing system to compensate copyright holders for the use of their work.
The organisation also wants to see the introduction of new legislation to regulate the use of AI.
Writing Australia's Wenona Byrne said authors should be included in any consultation about AI regulation.
"We'd like to see the tech companies working with Australian creatives — that's fundamental," she said.
"We know that the work of Australian writers is of very high value and using it without their consent or remuneration is akin to theft of their copyright material.
"We want to look at different ways that generative AI can compensate original creators for their work, whether that's through licensing models or royalty schemes that would see the fair and equitable treatment of the creators."
The issue of AI — including the proposed TDM exemption — will be on the agenda at the first Writing Australia council meeting, scheduled for late August.
"It's the biggest issue for the industry at the moment,"Byrne said.
"The writing industry is a $2 billion industry in Australia; it's one that we are rightly proud of, and anything that would diminish the potential for that industry to thrive is something [we] would be very concerned about."