APRA AMCOS Responds to Tech Council Chair Scott Farquhar: 'The AI Industry Has Had Every Opportunity to Negotiate'

APRA AMCOS CEO Dean Ormston has responded to comments made by Scott Farquhar at the Australian Financial Review's AI Summit in Sydney. 

“Every few months, Scott Farquhar discovers that Australian copyright law exists, as it does in over 180 other countries. Every few months, Australia's songwriters, composers, authors and artists explain why that's a feature, not a bug,” Ormston's statement begins. 

"Now Scott Farquhar says it's ‘impossible’ to train AI in Australia under existing copyright law. That's simply not true. 

"APRA AMCOS has 100 years of licensing experience. We have licensed radio, television, streaming platforms and social media, and every new technology as it has arrived in Australia. 

“We know how to do business. We want to do business.”

Ormston's statement continues: "The AFR's own reporting today notes that AI investment decisions are ‘primarily based on access to capital, energy, water and physical land’, not copyright law. Major AI investments across the Asia-Pacific have flowed to India, Malaysia and Thailand, where copyright laws are as strict as Australia's. 

“The data centre argument is a distraction. The copyright argument is a negotiating position, one being prosecuted with particular urgency as the major AI platforms position themselves for IPO.

“The issue isn't the law. It's that the major AI platforms don't want to pay. Not one has made a genuine attempt to come to the table, engage with rights holders, or explore what a fair commercial negotiation might look like.”

Ormston's statement concludes: "The content that drives the value of these models is not blog posts or social media commentary. It is the highest quality catalogued creative work, the songs, the scores, the novels, the screenplays, built by professional creators over careers and lifetimes. That is what they keep coming back for. And that is precisely what Australia's copyright framework is designed to protect."

"Instead, what we are seeing is a coordinated attempt to decouple payment from copyright rights altogether. The proposal doing the rounds, a one-off fund distributed as a goodwill gesture in exchange for closing off any ongoing licensing obligation, is not a licensing framework. 

"it is a receipt for robbery. Creators would go from being licensors to being mendicants. That is not a settlement. That is a surrender the creative sector will not accept.

“The window Mr Farquhar is worried about closing? Don't blame the law. Don't blame creators. The AI industry has had every opportunity to negotiate, to engage, and to treat Australian creators as partners rather than a cost to be avoided. They have chosen not to. That is not a legal problem. That is a choice.”