Australia’s government is preparing to legislate mandatory national standards for artificial intelligence next year, placing copyright protections at the centre of its approach. The plan comes from a major policy speech outlining a “clear, consistent and mandatory” framework for how AI can be deployed across the country.
Lawmakers want regulations that protect creators without overregulating the technology and scaring off investment or innovation. Officials frame the goal as building rules that can adapt quickly as AI capabilities shift.
Copyright holders across creative industries welcome the move, seeing it as a direct response to heavy lobbying from global tech platforms. Those platforms have been pushing for a broad text and data mining exemption in Australian copyright law that would let AI firms scrape books, music, art and journalism at scale.
Media organisations including News Corp Australasia, as well as writers, musicians and visual artists, have argued that such an exemption would gut their ability to control and monetise their work. The government now signals it will not accept an arrangement where creative output is treated as a free training dataset for AI models.
Planned standards are likely to centre on explicit consent and control for rights holders when their work is used in AI training. Creative groups stress that, in every major market so far, artists and media companies struggle to track, authorise or prevent their content being ingested by AI systems.
Governments worldwide are still grappling with how to define ownership, compensation and transparency obligations in this context. Australia’s move indicates it wants to close those gaps rather than copy more permissive overseas models that many creators see as tilted toward large technology companies.
