Last week I went to Canberra with a group of other people who live by selling our creative work. We make the books, songs, artwork, First Nations artworks, films, music and TV shows that delight and entertain us, reveal us to ourselves as humans, and connect us as Australians.
The works we make are our property. They are ours to sell. In my case, this involves licensing my books to publishers around the world, who produce and distribute them for money, 8-12% of which comes back to me as royalties. This is how copyright works. It is the law, in the same way as Torrens Title is the law for real estate property. Without copyright, no one would make anything. Why would you, if it could immediately be stolen from you? But this is what has happened. All my books have been ingested into AI computer programs without my consent and without payment.
Big tech is hoping to make vast fortunes from AI, and the valuations of these companies are based on them not paying their suppliers for the ingredients, which are our works. Of course your balance sheet looks better if you do not pay your suppliers.
The big tech companies are facing dozens of lawsuits on this issue in the US. They are now lobbying governments there and around the world to change the law so that what they have done is not illegal. They have not succeeded, but they are trying it on here in Australia now.
Indeed, in Bartz v Anthropic last year, a US$1.5bn settlement was awarded to authors, of whom I am one. Though all my works in many languages have been used illegally, only one title was compensable: I will get, eventually, US$3,000 for one stolen edition of All That I Am.
Legal action is not the way to go here.
We needed to go to Canberra because cashed-up representatives of big tech – including Google, Meta and Anthropic – have been lobbying the government hard to get rid of our right to our property. But they are not talking to us, who own the property they want. Big tech is falsely linking the gutting of our copyright with the building of AI centres here. That’s a total furphy. The datacentres are being built already. What they really want is to find a way to make the creative product of our country available to them for free, or for peanuts.
Last year the government firmly rejected the first attempt by big tech to get rid of copyright (and so the creative industries) in Australia. They called it a “text and data mining exemption” from copyright law. They wanted their taking of our work to be made legal, by “exempting” our work from copyright law. Calling it “mining” is interesting. Our government sets mining licences and terms, because all Australians are entitled to share in the profits of what we collectively own. But creative works are not ore in the ground. They are made by, and so owned by, individuals like me. I do not want the government to expropriate my life’s work from me.
Now, big tech is said to be secretly proposing a way for the government to compulsorily…
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