The International Confederation of Music Publishers has stated that artificial intelligence models have already been trained on music by Australian artists including Kylie Minogue and Nick Cave without payment to the creators. The organization cautioned that tech companies are attempting to pressure Australian policymakers into weakening the country’s copyright protections to facilitate AI development.
The ICMP’s managing director, John Phelan, characterized the industry’s requests as an attempt to “legitimise larceny” and noted that Australia appears to be the only country seriously considering such legal changes among dozens that have been approached by AI companies. He pointed to evidence showing that Google’s Gemini AI system was able to reproduce lyrics from Australian artists, contradicting claims by the AI industry that their models have not been trained on Australian content due to copyright restrictions. A training dataset reported earlier this year contained over 12 million songs sourced from YouTube, including tracks by local artists.
Parliamentary committee members have described the current situation as a stalemate, with some noting that AI models in the United States train on copyrighted works without creator compensation, but that companies have withheld access to their latest frontier AI models in Australia pending copyright law changes. A joint recommendation from the committee’s Labor chair and Liberal deputy chair suggested the government examine copyright settings while preserving creator control and compensation.
Representatives from AI companies including Anthropic and OpenAI have presented arguments to the committee that comprehensive licensing is impractical given the scale of available internet content. OpenAI’s economic policy chief cited the company’s voluntary agreements with News Corp and the Guardian as examples of deals made despite US fair use protections. Phelan suggested that companies may be seeking legislative solutions due to mounting investment costs and ongoing copyright litigation in the United States.
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