Senator David Pocock presented a document in the Australian Senate on Tuesday that he described as screenshots of government consultation material, titled "AI on Australian Terms". It sets out ways for AI companies to train on Australian content without asking each creator, including an option under which rightsholders would have to "digitally protect" their work to keep it out of training sets. The proposals became known after representatives of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, met Labor ministers. A day before the document surfaced, Labor industry minister Tim Ayres said Australia's future AI rules would "in no way" mean weaker copyright protection.
The problem the document is trying to solve is stated plainly in it. AI companies want to train on material and data published on the internet, and Australian copyright rules do not let them use content from Australia. The document also notes that an enormous number of small independent authors publish online, and that concluding voluntary agreements with each of them is "unrealistic or impossible".
From there it describes two approaches. Under the first, AI companies get the right to use any unprotected material from the internet for training, provided they conclude agreements with a sufficient number of companies. Under the second, they deal with organizations representing rightsholders and gain access to material belonging even to authors who are not members of the organization that signed: a licence for one category of content, music or text, would extend across many small creators in that industry. Separately, the option that rightsholders themselves must digitally protect their material if they do not want models trained on it is one rightsholders consider unworkable.
Pocock's objection was to where the burden lands. Such a compromise, he said, would put the interests of AI companies above those of ordinary Australians and hand them access to everything the country's residents have made unless those people opted out in advance. The duty to protect rights Australians already hold over their own work, he said, should not be shifted onto the Australians who hold them.
The government's answer has been a mixture of denial and enthusiasm. Ayres gave the "in no way" line on Monday. Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said the federal government is "working at pace" on the copyright question, while calling the prospect of cooperation with American technology giants a significant moment for the country. On ABC's 7.30 on Tuesday evening he said the economic opportunities of working with frontier companies and hosting frontier model training in Australia are enormous, that the government wants those projects, but only on terms that serve the national interest. He confirmed that federal officials had discussed the matter with technology companies in San Francisco over the past two weeks, and said a deal could be reached.
Before the document was published on Tuesday, Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young called the possible copyright compromise outrageous, saying every Australian should be paid for the work they create and that weakening the law would let large technology companies take local creators' work for free for their own profit. Musicians, writers and artists have spent this year campaigning against any weakening, after reports that AI companies were offering investments of up to $50 billion in data centre construction in exchange for exactly these changes. Attorney-General Michelle Rowland is running the government's consultations with the organizations the reform would touch; her spokesperson said on Tuesday that any future copyright changes must give rightsholders real control over how their work is used and fair compensation.
OpenAI's vice-president for global affairs Anne O'Leary met ministers and officials this week. The company is considering investing in Australia. Asked by The Australian about the prospect of training models in the country, O'Leary said OpenAI is not ready to discuss such a project until the underlying problem — the copyright constraints — is resolved. The paper presented this as an ultimatum aimed at pressuring the government. Marles said the outlet had overstated what was said, and OpenAI asked The Australian to correct the headline and the text. Assistant technology minister Andrew Charlton told News24 on Tuesday that he had seen no ultimatum and would reject one if the company actually made such a demand.
Ayres's denial and the document are not quite in conflict, which is the trouble with it. Nothing in either option repeals a right. Both leave copyright formally intact and change who has to act to enforce it. The load-bearing sentence is the one admitting that per-creator licensing is "unrealistic or impossible", because there are two ways to answer that. One is to build machinery that makes consent at scale possible. The other is to remove the need for consent. Both approaches in the document take the second route, and an opt-out regime plus extended collective licensing is what that route looks like when it is written down politely.
The part nobody in this story has priced is what Australia gets. OpenAI is "considering" investing; the only figure in circulation is the reported $50 billion, and it was attached to an offer, not a signature. Set against that is a permanent change to how copyright works for everyone who publishes in the country. Charlton is the only official quoted putting a number on the other side of the ledger, and his number is a willingness to lose a few data centres — which is a real position, and the first one in this debate that treats the trade as a trade.
An opt-out converts a right that holds by default into one a musician or a novelist has to assert, file by file, against systems that keep reading in the meantime. Ministers are free to call that something other than weakening copyright. It is harder to name what else it changes.