Artists’ rights are compromised in the productivity commission’s data and digital technology interim report findings

The Arts Law Centre of Australia has expressed dismay at the Productivity Commission’s interim report about the possibility of introducing a text and data mining exception to Australia’s copyright regime.  Arts Law is critical of the approach in which copyright is diluted, to the detriment of the arts. 

“Robust artists’ rights make for a thriving cultural economy from which everyone benefits”, says Arts Law CEO and copyright scholar, Dr Louise Buckingham; “the Productivity Commission’s understanding of economics seems a bit off on this point.”

The Productivity Commission says that “large AI models are already being trained on unlicensed copyright materials”. Big Tech already benefits through all sorts of economic and policy levers that have meant as a sector, its profit margins have increased at a rate almost as swift as the technological developments that have brought the world generative artificial intelligence. At the same time, the arts as a sector, and artists as individual members of society and taxpayers, have been hit hard by the cost-of-living crisis and are increasingly vulnerable. Arts Law’s preference is for efforts and energies to be geared towards sound policy and law-making that ensures artists’ rights, historically and effectively embodied in our Copyright Act, are enforceable and supported. 

Arts Law is especially disappointed that the Productivity Commission, which recognised the economic importance of First Nations’ arts and crafts to Australia as a whole in its 2022 report about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts and crafts, which led in part to the government’s commitment to forthcoming legislation to protect Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property, has failed to consider the likely impact of a text and data mining exception in the Copyright Act on our first artists who practise 65,000+ years of continuous culture as well as creating contemporary works. “First Nations artists were led to expect that the Productivity Commission understood the value of ICIP, however, facilitating its misuse and misappropriation digitally gravely undermines that”, Arts Law believes.

Productivity Commission’s Harnessing data and digital technology Interim Report was released on 5 August 2025.