The Business Council of Australia (BCA) represents Australia’s largest employers, committed to building a stronger, more competitive, more productive Australia. We welcome the opportunity to respond to the Attorney-General’s Department’s consultation on copyright and AI.
At the outset, we acknowledge Australia’s rich and diverse cultural industries, encompassing writers, musicians, journalists, artists, filmmakers, and digital copyright owners. There is enduring value in Australian information, storytelling, and cultural production to our national identity, democratic health, and global cultural presence.
Our position throughout this submission is guided by three principles:
- Copyright owners should have maximum autonomy to form voluntary licensing deals and opt-out of AI training if they wish.
- AI developers and Australian businesses should have legal certainty to use lawfully accessed materials for AI training in a way that maximises innovation and competitiveness.
- Copyright law should be applied to AI in the same way it applies to everything else. This protects expression while keeping the underlying ideas, themes, concepts, and methods free for everyone to use and build upon.
Compulsory, legislated frameworks are relatively static, limiting future creativity and commercial opportunities for both copyright owners and technology firms. This means voluntary licensing should remain the backbone of Australia’s copyright framework. It gives both creators and industry the flexibility to strike bespoke commercial deals that reflect real market value rather than rigid statutory mandates. And it allows licensing models to evolve organically as technology and business practices mature, ensuring the system adapts through market incentives rather than regulation.
Copyright owners should also have full control over their material and be able to easily signal that their material should not be used for AI training or related data-mining activities. Opt-out mechanisms such as robots.txt, embedded metadata flags, and centralised registries are long-standing, low-cost tools that allow copyright owners to express their preferences without requiring complex legal processes. By adopting and consistently honouring these opt-out signals, AI developers would demonstrate good-faith respect for rights holders and help create a predictable environment in which copyright owners retain agency while AI systems can continue to develop responsibly and efficiently.
Recommendations
- Support voluntary licensing and copyright owners’ autonomy.
- Support and honour simple, low-burden, universally recognised opt-out mechanisms such as robots.txt, metadata flags, and registry-based systems.
- Undertake further consultation on opt-outs.
- Avoid creating new rights in Al-generated outputs.
- Provide clear liability rules for developers and deployers.
The BCA would welcome engagement on a workable pathway to further clarify the application of the Copyright Act.
Australia can achieve a balanced, future-proof copyright system by maintaining voluntary licensing and supporting easy opt-outs as the foundation of both copyright owners’ autonomy and commercial innovation.