Music body warns Australia against weakening copyright for AI training; cites uncompensated use of Australian songs

What happened

The International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP), which represents Sony, Warner and Universal publishers plus thousands of independents, told Guardian Australia that AI models have already trained on Australian artists' music - including Kylie Minogue, Nick Cave, G-Flip and Hilltop Hoods - without compensation, and warned against weakening copyright law under tech-company pressure.

The claims

ICMP managing director John Phelan called the lobbying an attempt to 'legitimise larceny', said Australia is the only one of 62 countries seriously considering a commercial text-and-data-mining exception, and cited a YouTube-sourced dataset of 12M+ songs. Separately, ICMP said it gave evidence that Google's Gemini can reproduce lyrics by Australian artists.

The parliamentary response

This week, Labor and Liberal members of the parliamentary committee on AI described the situation as a stalemate and jointly recommended the government examine copyright settings while preserving creator control and compensation. Anthropic special envoy Jeffrey Bleich and OpenAI director of economic policy Adam Cohen testified at the committee. A committee report is due November 30.

Status

A legislative/policy development. The Gemini lyric-reproduction claim is ICMP's evidence, not an independently established finding, and inclusion of a song in a dataset does not establish a specific model trained on it. No court action is involved.