Writers welcome Government announcement protecting creator copyright – The Australian Writers’ Guild (AWG) and Australian Writers’ Guild Authorship Collecting Society (AWGACS) welcome the Attorney-General’s announcement that the Australian Government will maintain Australia’s strong copyright framework.
The Australian Writers’ Guild is the professional association for Australian screen and stage writers across film, television, theatre, audio and interactive media and has protected and promoted their creative and professional interests for more than 60 years.
Established in 1996, the Australian Writers’ Guild Authorship Collecting Society (AWGACS) is the not-for-profit collecting society for screenwriters.
AWGACS collects and distributes international and domestic royalties for Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand writers.
AWG and AWGACS welcome the Attorney-General ruling out a Text and Data Mining (TDM) exception, a change that would have eroded Australia’s copyright laws and retroactively legitimised the theft of writers’ works by big tech. Big tech companies, led by the Tech Council of Australia’s Scott Farquhar, have been lobbying for weakening Australia’s copyright laws to allow the wholesale ingestion of Australian works for Artificial Intelligence (AI) without compensation or consent.
The Attorney General has ruled out this change and pledged to work with creatives through the Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Reference Group (CAIRG).
“We applaud the Government making this announcement in the face of sustained pressure from big tech, particularly foreign-owned companies, who want to strip-mine our culture and content,”
– said Claire Pullen, AWG and AWGACS Group CEO.
“This sends a message that our cultural and creative industries can be part of ethical AI development as partners, not subordinates – that Australian creators can negotiate terms, not be dictated to.”
In October, Pullen gave evidence to a Senate inquiry for AWG and AWGACS that writers contribute $1 billion a year to Australia’s economy, a contribution that was at risk due to the behaviour of big tech companies. “We applaud the Government for stating so clearly that there is no ambiguity in Australian law, and that Government stands behind Australian writers,” Pullen said.
Media Release – AWG
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Writers welcome Government announcement protecting creator copyright
