‘Don’t kill music’: Anthony Albanese’s favourite bands beg PM to stop AI companies from stealing their work
A potential deal with the government would allow international tech companies to mine the creative work of Australian musicians. Some of the prime minister’s favourite artists told the Guardian how they feel about it Creatives sound alarm on copyright as Pocock calls $50bn datacentre proposal ‘ultimate dirty deal’ Big tech companies are asking for Australian copyright laws to be watered down, to allow them to scrape Australian output – including journalism, music and books – in order to improve their AI models. Guardian Australia this week reported on an industry proposal under which companies would commit more than $50bn in investment in datacentres and set up a $350m fund to compensate creatives in exchange for weaker copyright laws. Senator David Pocock has described it as the “ultimate dirty deal”. The Albanese government has insisted it has no plans to weaken copyright protections, after ruling out the potential text and data mining exemption last year – but creatives are so