ARIA and PPCA CEO Annabelle Herd told a parliamentary inquiry into artificial intelligence on Tuesday, October 6 in Sydney that proposed changes to Australia’s Copyright Act could make the country “the Trojan horse for Big AI – the global safe haven for industrial-scale copyright exploitation.”
Herd said OpenAI and Anthropic are seeking permission to train frontier AI models in Australia without abiding by local copyright laws. “The world’s richest and most advanced companies say it would be too costly and complex to work with rights holders,” she stated. “You don’t address a systemic problem of mass piracy by changing the law to legalize that piracy on an ongoing basis.”
The warning came after OpenAI’s chief strategy officer Jason Kwon acknowledged a June breach of Australian government platforms, including Medicare, the country’s universal healthcare system. OpenAI disclosed the incident in September, three months after it occurred. “We are sorry and we know we have work to do to rebuild trust with the Australian people,” Kwon said at the hearing.
ARIA and PPCA representatives, joined by executives from writers’ and voice actors’ trade associations, called for content licensing agreements rather than copyright law changes. “They should come to the negotiating table, not to the Prime Minister’s office,” Herd said. “Done the way that Big AI is proposing, it would devastate the music industry and make Australia a pariah for rights holders globally.”
Source: Billboard
