Google and other tech giants have called on the Australian government to relax copyright laws to allow artificial intelligence to mine websites for information across the internet.
In a submission to the government’s review of copyright enforcement published this week, Google argued the government needs to consider whether copyright law has “the necessary flexibilities” to support the development of AI.
The company has called for the introduction of a fair dealing exception for text and data mining for AI.
“The lack of such copyright flexibilities means that investment in and development of AI and machine-learning technologies is happening and will continue to happen overseas,” Google said.
“AI-powered products and services are being created in other countries with more innovation-focused copyright frameworks, such as the US, Singapore and Japan, and then exported to Australia for use by Australian consumers and businesses.
“Without these discrete exceptions, Australia risks only ever being an importer of certain kinds of technologies.”
Google’s position was supported by Communications Alliance – which represents internet companies including Meta, Twitter and Amazon Web Services. The lobby group for digital platforms, Digi, went further than Google, arguing that copyright law needed to be examined to see if AI-created content would be protected.
“It is currently unclear whether works that are created by an AI program may … not benefit from copyright protection,” Digi said. “The approach to ownership of AI generated works should be clarified.”
Google listed Google Translate as one of the benefits derived from AI, while Digi said AI could be used to detect, remove and report pro-terror and child abuse material online.
“Companies investing in these solutions need to be able to process large volumes of illegal materials, but also ‘safe’ legal materials so that the technology can learn to distinguish between the two,” Digi said.
“However, it is not clear to what extent the existing fair dealing exceptions in Australian law for private use would enable research and development of this nature.”
The push comes at a time when content creators such as news websites, music owners, photographers and artists are seeking protections from AI harvesting their content for its products without compensation.
The peak body for music companies, Aria, said in its submission that as technology such as AI evolves, copyright law needs to ensure artists are “fairly remunerated for the use of their intellectual property”.
News Corp is reportedly in discussions with one AI company about compensation.
