The fight over who owns the words, images and music that train artificial intelligence has found a new and pointed voice in Australian publishing, and it is not coming from the big end of town. Paul Thomas, the managing director of regional media company Star News Group, has issued a blunt warning to Canberra: do not let the world’s richest technology companies talk the government into rewriting copyright law in their favour.
Writing in B&T, Paul Thomas argues that when global AI companies lobby governments while simultaneously dangling billions of dollars in promised investment, there is an obvious and uncomfortable risk. The rights of Australian creators, publishers and journalists could be quietly traded away in the process. His central point is that the country’s copyright framework, which has long treated original work as property that cannot simply be taken, must not become a bargaining chip.
Why this argument is landing now
The timing is not accidental. Over the past year the major AI developers have made no secret of their appetite for Australian data centres, energy and, crucially, a regulatory environment that lets them train large models with as little friction as possible. Companies including Anthropic have floated enormous local infrastructure ambitions, and the federal government has stood up a new national AI office to coordinate the country’s response. Against that backdrop, the question of what these firms are allowed to do with existing Australian content has moved from a niche legal debate to a mainstream policy fight.
The heart of the matter is a proposed change to how copyright works in the age of machine learning. AI models are trained by ingesting vast quantities of text, images, audio and video, much of it created by working journalists, novelists, musicians, photographers and artists. Tech companies argue that this ingestion should be treated as a form of fair use or covered by a broad text and data mining exception, meaning they would not need to seek permission or pay for the material. Rights holders counter that this is simply large-scale copying of their work, monetised by someone else, and that any exception amounts to a transfer of value from creators to some of the most valuable corporations ever built.
Thomas plants his flag firmly on the creators’ side. His case is not that Australia should shun AI or wall itself off from investment. It is that investment should not be allowed to buy a weakening of the rules that protect the people whose work makes the models useful in the first place. When the same companies that want your content are also promising to build in your backyard, he suggests, governments need to be clear-eyed about which conversation is really taking place.
Two sides of a genuine tension
The counter-view deserves a fair hearing, because it is not frivolous. Technology firms and some economists argue that overly strict copyright rules could leave Australia behind. If local developers cannot legally train models on the material that is freely available to competitors in the United States or parts of Asia, the argument runs, then serious AI work will simply happen offshore and Australia will import the results while exporting the opportunity. On this reading, a modern text and data mining exception is less a giveaway than a precondition for having a domestic AI industry at all.
That framing has real force, and it explains why the debate has split opinion even within government circles. The Productivity Commission has canvassed the idea of a text and data mining exception as part of its work on harnessing digital technology, and the Prime Minister himself has spoken about the economic promise of AI while acknowledging the copyright question sits unresolved. The tension is not manufactured. It is the collision of two things Australia genuinely wants, a thriving creative sector and a competitive technology sector, and there is no costless way to reconcile them.
Where Thomas pushes back is on the assumption that the trade-off must be settled in the tech companies’ favour because they hold the chequebook. His concern is procedural as much as it is philosophical. A copyright regime built up over decades should not be renegotiated under the implicit pressure of investment announcements, and the voices of individual creators and small publishers should not be drowned out by the lobbying budgets of firms with market values larger than the Australian economy’s biggest listed companies.
The Australian stakes
For Australia, the outcome matters well beyond the newsroom. The local media industry has already lived through one wrenching adjustment to the platform era, watching advertising revenue migrate to Google and Meta before the News Media Bargaining Code forced a partial rebalancing. Regional publishers such as Star News Group, which serve communities that metropolitan mastheads no longer cover in depth, operate on thin margins where the free use of their journalism to train commercial AI products is not an abstract worry but a direct threat to viability.
There is also a broader cultural argument. Australian stories, voices and creative output are part of what distinguishes the country’s content from a globalised, homogenised feed. If the economic incentive to produce that work erodes because it can be scraped and repackaged without payment, the long-term cost is not only to individual creators but to the diversity of Australian public life. The government’s own artists and cultural bodies have already pressed for a seat at the table as AI policy is written, reflecting a widely shared unease that creative labour is being treated as raw material rather than as work with a rightful owner.
Equally, the country cannot pretend the investment on offer is trivial. Data centres bring jobs, energy demand, sovereign capability and tax revenue, and there is a legitimate national interest in Australia hosting frontier AI infrastructure rather than renting it from abroad. The challenge for policymakers is to capture that upside without accepting terms that hollow out the sectors AI is trained on.
What happens next
The copyright question is likely to come to a head through the government’s broader AI policy work and any legislative response to the Productivity Commission’s recommendations. Rights holders will keep pressing for licensing regimes that require payment and consent, while technology companies will keep advocating for exceptions that lower the cost and legal risk of training. The new national AI office gives Canberra a coordinating body, but coordination is not the same as a decision, and the hard call about copyright has not yet been made.
Thomas’s intervention is a reminder that the loudest voices in this debate are not the only ones with a stake in it. Whether the government treats copyright as a firm principle or a negotiable feature of the investment climate will shape not just the balance sheets of publishers, but the terms on which Australia’s creative and technology futures are built.
Sources: B&T
