Content creators in Australia should support APRA AMCOS’s efforts to secure royalties from AI companies that use copyrighted content to train their models.

APRA AMCOS believe that if a company uses a someone’s copyrighted material to train a model, a reproduction of that work has likely occurred during the training process. When someone reproduces copyrighted material, they’re liable to pay royalties.

It is difficult to see how an AI company could make the case that they have used material in their process without reproducing it in some way.

They will try. They believe that they have the right to use your content for free and on their own terms. They believe they have the right to use your content to build a product, sell it and make profit for themselves.

Their arguments for this right are weak.

“The scale of data required to train generative AI models makes the documentation and disclosure of individual training data infeasible. Given the massive scale of data involved, it is impossible to definitively know whether specific publicly-available data is protected by copyright or not.” – Meta

Meta is saying they likely ingest copyrighted material and admit they haven’t developed a process to prevent this occurring. Meta and others admit they are likely breaching copyright law and should be allowed to continue doing so, because without access to copyrighted material the social consequences would be dire:

“…data relating to modern events or cultural or social issues such as LGBTQI rights, for example, would be excluded from those datasets. It is predictable that the models would then show bias or have gaps or ignorance about  those interests and about that large and important part of our society.” – Google

But the issue at hand is whether creators should be compensated when Google uses their content in their AI product, not LGBTQI rights. Are Google’s commercial products so culturally important that they have a moral imperative to use whoever’s content they want, on their own terms, to make money?

Their arguments are disingenuous at best. They’re designed to hamper the speed at which we reach the inevitable conclusion of the discussion: if you use copyrighted material, you have to pay royalties to the copyright holder.

AMCOS is on the front foot here, anticipating the fallback position of these big companies will take. They will argue that even if they wanted to pay royalties, there is no feasible way for them to do so.

This is why AMCOS will propose a blanket license option as a solution. This will make it easy for big companies to pay royalties to use copyrighted material. AMCOS can then can distribute royalties to rights-holders that have opted in to the arrangement.

This approach is the one most likely end in a positive outcome for content creators, artists and rights-holders in Australia.

This is why when you’re asked to vote on this measure, it’s important that you vote yes.