SYDNEY, Australia — As Australia’s leadership considers rewrites to the nation’s copyright laws that would allow for AI training, the land down under finds itself front and center in the creative industries’ most pressing issue.
It’s a fast-moving target. OpenAI, Anthropic and others have tirelessly lobbied the federal government for changes in the copyright act that would enable the tech companies to train AI models in these parts.
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Should big AI get the win, the music industry has warned, a potential doomsday scenario could unfold for the arts.
“Done the way that Big AI is proposing,” ARIA CEO Annabelle Herd remarked in October, “it would devastate the music industry and make Australia a pariah for rights holders globally.”
Earlier, in July, prime minister Anthony Albanese had given assurances that tech and AI companies couldn’t use copyright-protected works including consent, credit and compensation, broadly in with the message from the music community.
A kind of smackdown was delivered Oct. 13, however, when Jo Briskey and Jono Duniam, co-chairs of the joint parliamentary committee for AI, suggested that Australia’s existing copyright law wasn’t up the scratch and that, without fresh changes, creators would miss out in the AI age.
Not only was the statement “wrong,” Herd said at the time, but “it ignores substantial evidence provided to the Committee. Australian copyright law gives creators control. It is the only thing standing between major American AI companies and unchecked access to the world’s content right here from Australia.”
In the digital era, implores the labels association and other creative industry trade bodies, the world’s music, books, journalism, films, photographs and other copyright material published online are at risk under the proposals.
The International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP) agrees with the assessment.
“This is a vast landgrab,” explains John Phelan, director general of the Brussels-based ICMP, which represents 90% of the world’s commercially released music and whose members include Universal Music Publishing Group, Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell Music, BMG, Kobalt, Reservoir and Concord Music Publishing, alongside thousands of other indie publishers. “We say they must play by the same Australian and international laws as all other AI companies who respect the rules and so our industry licenses.”
Earlier in 2026, APRA AMCOS hosted the CISAC board of directors in Sydney. AI was at the top of the agenda. Billboard recently caught up with Phelan for an update on an issue whose “implications are global.”
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Billboard: Just how concerned should the international music community be, and why should the situation in Australia — of all places — deserve our attention?
John Phelan: What’s on the table is a plan, cooked as much in Silicon Valley as Sydney, to enable tech and AI companies to utilize the world’s digital music for ingestion and training.
The downstream GenAI product would be paid for. But the proposal is still as commercially and legally harmful as could be. The mitigation mechanism being placed under the prime minister’s nose is an opt out system. But this cannot work. The ideas have gained a lot of traction by politicians at the highest level, due to a combination of eagerness to act on AI markets and other interests.
But make no mistake, this is subordination dressed up as sovereignty. It must not meet legal ink.
ICMP has data on how these AI companies have scraped enormous volumes of content. It would appear they’re using the tactic “best to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.” Just how serious and at what scale are these copyright infringements you’ve observed?
For several years now, ICMP has been gathering detailed evidence of extensive copyright infringement by a number of tech companies. It’s important that when people think AI, they recall the incumbent big tech companies are as immersed, if not more so, in willful and knowing copyright infringement for AI purposes as the emerging AI specific companies.
The evidence ICMP has collated demonstrates clear breaches of legal rights and commercial duties by companies such as Google, Microsoft, Meta and several of its big ticket corporate divisions and services, Amazon, Adobe, as well as Anthropic, OpenAI, Suno, Udio and DeepSeek.
This evidence is as blatant in its clarity as it is essentially wholescale in its effects. There is barely a songwriter, composers or music company unaffected.
We have been using this detailed evidence with governments around the world in private as a principal means of showing that these companies are engaged in stream-ripping on a scale previously unseen. This unlicensed accessing of the world’s digital music is not only illegal, but the source of a panoply of downstream harms, including illegal model training, dataset commercialization and GenAI, circumvention of Technical Protection Measures, streaming fraud and other digital market impacts.
These need to be tackled as far upstream as possible, at source. There needs to be a combination of responses, including legislative, litigative, licensing, metadata and technology adoption to filter out infringements or facilitate licensed usage.
The evidence book has helped persuade a large number of governments around the world not to introduce new laws providing a free pass for AI and tech. It’s also refocusing their attention on what should really be done, and that is enforcing their laws against unlicensed use of music.
The work, alongside out member companies’ business approach, has torpedoed the longstanding and deliberately dissembling claim by some that these are binary issues of the tech sector or music. Rather, it’s a case of some companies in the tech sector don’t want to play by the rules and secure the relevant licenses first. It’s those who we are going after.
There is simply no legal or commercial barrier to training an AI model on the world’s music. See ElevenLabs as a case in point of doing things the right way by seeking permission first on an opt in basis.
The company now valued north of $22 billion. So it’s the commercial hypocrisy of the bad actors who need to be tackled. We’re working to ensure Australia’s government becomes one of dozens of others who now understand the actions and motives of Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI), Dario Amodei (CEO of Anthropic) and similar.
The music community has suggested that Big AI is attempting to strong-arm governments, and that, under the right conditions, could pull off the largest copyright larceny in history. Is that hyperbole?
At ICMP we talk of four basic links in the AI market chain: accessing works, often at vast scale; the pre-training and training phase; the dataset commercialization phase and the GenAI output. Some companies enact all in-house, some outsource some phases.
Each phase implies different copyrights. And any phase engaged in with digital music without prior clearance from relevant rightholders is an infringement.
We’re seeing evidence of many of these phases across all the companies I’ve put on the record here, and several others. In response, our industry is taking the four-pronged response I mentioned — first get to governments worldwide, litigate as needed, license where wanted, adopt the right tech across all.
What we see in terms of the scale of the ingestion is simply unprecedented.
In a recent meeting with the Australian government we were able to show, at speed, all 10 of the prime minister’s favorite songs were illegally used, that all 12 Australian orchestras’ had their work infringed and that specific songs of established and emerging Australian stars were being impacted by bad actors. The fact this can be shown against such an amount of the world’s music is showing that there can be no legitimizing of these processes.
We need to refuse OpenAI, Anthropic and Big Tech’s asks and instead focus on enforcement.
What’s next?
Lots of political horse trading and behind-the-scenes jousting. The Australian Standing Committee on AI has put its cards on the table by calling for copyright reform in the name of AI. ICMP has replied to the PM Office’s headline ask of “what does good transparency look like regarding AI markets?”
Australian rightholders, spearheaded by our Australasian industry group AMPAL on behalf of every last Australian music publishing and production music company, are working superbly. Key senators are engaged. The tech companies are throwing the kitchen sink at this one.
Summer recess kicks in end of November. That will be a big junction but not the end of the road. The timeline will likely extend. But the targets are as clear as they are crucial.
