What IFPI told the Albanese government about AI copyright
On 9 November 2026, The Guardian reported that the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the global body representing the recorded music industry, had warned Prime Minister Anthony Albanese that weakening Australian copyright law to accommodate artificial intelligence (AI) model training would be a “disaster for creativity”. IFPI Chief Executive Victoria Oakley described the potential shift as “ridiculous and dangerous”. Her intervention comes as the Albanese government weighs copyright reform within a broader policy agenda covering AI, data centre infrastructure and online safety.
The warning responds to lobbying by AI developers, including Anthropic. They have urged the government to adopt either an “opt-out” regime or statutory exceptions that would allow AI models to be trained on copyrighted material without negotiating individual licences. Developers argue that requiring licences for web-scale training data creates legal uncertainty and discourages local deployment. Rights holders counter that a broad exception in Australia would not stay local. In their view, it would create a global copyright “safe harbour” through which creative works from any country could be scraped and used for training.
This is a copyright and technology story rather than an environmental one. It still matters to Australian environmental professionals and their clients. Consultancies, laboratories, developers, councils and law firms all produce or hold large volumes of copyrighted technical work: reports, data sets, figures and conceptual models. Many of these documents are publicly accessible. The government’s decision on AI training could affect whether that material can be used to build commercial AI tools without permission or payment. It may also shape how much confidence professional services firms can place in the provenance of the AI products they buy.
The “safe harbour” argument and the reform options
The central argument in the IFPI warning is jurisdictional. Oakley put it this way: “You just need one safe harbour, because then you can train on music from anywhere in the world. So this isn’t just about Australian music and Australian culture; it’s about music and culture everywhere.” IFPI’s position is that relaxing training rules in Australia would not confine training to Australian content, because developers could rely on an Australian exception to train on creative works from anywhere. Oakley also questioned why “a sophisticated, democratic country that has a phenomenal cultural power of its own” would “buy into the promises of a few large AI companies”.
The government’s stated position leaves the detail open. Attorney-General Michelle Rowland has said the government aims to ensure “any future copyright changes deliver meaningful control and fair compensation”. Submissions to government consultations have explored several alternatives to individual licensing. These include default scraping paired with centralised remuneration pools, and qualifying collective licences. Creative industries argue that these models would strip creators of moral rights, the ability to enforce provenance, and bargaining power in negotiating terms with AI developers.
The current legal baseline is the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), which contains no specific text and data mining exception. Its fair dealing provisions apply only to defined purposes, such as research or study, criticism or review, parody or satire, and reporting news. Unlike the United States, Australia has no broad, open-ended fair use defence. In October 2025 the Attorney-General said the government would not introduce a text and data mining exception. Debate has since shifted to the alternatives above, including an opt-out model, which is the main point of contention in the IFPI intervention.
The European Union is the most developed comparison. Under Article 4 of the 2019 Digital Single Market Copyright Directive, rights holders can reserve their works from commercial text and data mining. For content published online, they do this by machine-readable means. Article 53 of the EU AI Act requires providers of general-purpose AI models to put in place a policy to identify and comply with those reservations. Rights holders argue that if a tier-one common law jurisdiction such as Australia adopted broader exceptions, it would break the multilateral consensus building around frameworks like the EU’s and leave developers facing uneven compliance obligations across markets. They also argue that commercially negotiated AI licensing deals already work without statutory carve-outs. In their view, mandated exceptions would reduce AI vendors’ incentive to enter revenue-sharing or data access agreements with content creators, news organisations and media businesses.
What it means for Australian environmental consultancies
For Australian professional services firms, the reform debate bears directly on who controls technical work product. Under the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), copyright in a work made by an employee in the course of employment generally belongs to the employer, unless an agreement says otherwise. In consulting, ownership then depends on the client contract. Some engagements assign copyright to the client. Others retain it with the consultant and grant the client a licence. Few standard engagement terms written before 2023 address AI training at all. Whether those contracts give anyone meaningful control over AI use will depend on what Parliament does next.
Environmental consulting produces a large body of copyrighted material that is unusually accessible. Site investigation reports, remediation action plans, environmental audit reports and supporting data are routinely lodged with state regulators. Many are published on public registers or attached to development applications on council and state planning portals. Public availability does not remove copyright, and the Copyright Act has no exception that clearly permits copying those documents to train commercial AI models. An opt-out regime or a new statutory exception could change that, and would likely put the onus on report authors or their clients to reserve their work. Firms that want a say in the outcome can watch for further government consultation and, in the meantime, check whether their engagement terms deal with AI use of reports and data.
References and related sources
- Primary source: www.theguardian.com
- theguardian.com
- superpowerdaily.com
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Published: 09 Nov 2026
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