Australia AI copyright: one country of 62 may open a mining exception

The International Confederation of Music Publishers told Guardian Australia that Australia is on course to become the only country of 62 to open a commercial text and data mining exception in copyright law. John Phelan, the ICMP's director general, said the other 61 looked at the same question and left the exclusive rights of rights holders alone.

“Sixty-two countries have looked at changing the law for AI training data, and not one of the other 61 opened a new commercial text and data mining exception.”

— John Phelan, ICMP, Guardian Australia, 19 October 2026

What the publishers showed

ICMP handed over examples of Google's Gemini reproducing lyrics by Kylie Minogue, Nick Cave and G-Flip. It also pointed at a training set of more than 12 million songs scraped from YouTube, which covered those artists plus Hilltop Hoods. The publishers' argument rests on the output: if the model returns the words, the words went into the model weights, and nobody can pull one song back out of them afterwards.

Two paths in the leaked paper

A leaked policy document sets out two paths. One is an opt-out system, where a rights holder has to pull a catalogue out of AI training and collects through a central licensing body. The other is negotiation, where AI companies and rights-holder groups sign deals directly. Phelan said technology firms are tying their investment in the country to which path Australia picks.

The companies answered in their own words. Jeffrey Bleich of Anthropic said his company is not trying to dictate terms to Australia and has only explained what the current rules mean for its operations. Adam Cohen of OpenAI said the US fair use exception protects the development of new technology, while his company signs separate licensing deals anyway.

Australia is a small market to build a global precedent on. Australasia produced $623m of recorded music revenue in 2025 out of a world total of $31.7bn, by IFPI's count and the country itself slipped two places to 13th. That is 2% of the world's revenue deciding a rule that would apply to catalogues from everywhere.

The licensed route already has numbers attached to it. Universal put 60,202 songs into Suno under a deal we counted in October and Suno now charges for generation in credits whose real price we worked out. Rights holders who signed are being paid per track; rights holders under an opt-out would be paid through a body that does not exist yet.

What settles next

Attorney-General Michelle Rowland ruled out a text and data mining exception in October 2025, and the question came back within a year. What settles it now is which of the two leaked paths reaches a bill, and whether Canberra waits for the US courts to finish the training-data cases first, as ICMP has asked it to.

Informational material, not legal advice. The Australian policy document is a leak reported by the press, and the government has published no final text.