Right now in the United States, there are dozens of pending lawsuits involving copyright claims against artificial intelligence (AI) platforms. The judge in one case summed up what’s on the line when he said:

These products are expected to generate billions, even trillions, of dollars for the companies that are developing them. If using copyrighted works to train the models is as necessary as the companies say, they will figure out a way to compensate copyright holders for it.

On each side, the stakes seem existential. Authors’ livelihoods are at risk. Copyright-based industries – publishing, music, film, photography, design, television, software, computer games – face obliteration, as generative AI platforms scrape, copy and analyse massive amounts of copyright-protected content.

They often do this without paying for it, generating substitutes for material that would otherwise be made by human creators. On the other side, some in the tech sector say copyright is holding up the development of AI models and products.

And the battle lines are getting closer to home. In August, the Australian Productivity Commission suggested in an interim report, Harnessing Data and Digital Technology, that Australia’s copyright law could add a “fair dealing” exception to cover text and data mining.

“Fair dealing” is a defence against........

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