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Ever since she was barely a teen, the only quarrels I have ever had with my adored niece, Winnie, have been over the royalties payable on intellectual property.
I'm aware that sentence makes weekends at Auntie Virginia's sound like a real barrel of laughs. To be honest, such weekends could often include impromptu lectures on the only acceptable cheese for making cheese on toast, and the importance of making sure one's undies are actually on before going out ("doesn't matter", was usually her airy reply) but as she got older and brought her own worldview on movies, music and TV shows into my world — that's when we'd clash.
She was a fine representation of her generation and stood up with great gusto for the things that matter to them — to whit, ripping as much content as possible online and from streaming platforms without paying for it.
I was aghast.
"But you love those musicians! If you don't actually pay for their music, and pay them a living, how do you imagine they're going to be around to keep making the music you love?"
The answers usually involved something about Sony/Apple/Netflix/Universal "being able to afford it". Why should her friends care when they were broke teenagers staring into the content-rich maw of the mega-corporations?
Maybe it was their version of sticking it to the man, the man being the billionaire nerd who now controlled their every means of communication.
And she wasn't copping from me what she regarded as some Gen X hypocrisy: "You taped songs from the radio and copied songs onto 'mixed tapes' — what's the difference?" (You and I know that radio stations pay royalties for playing those songs, and you had to have the hard copy of the music in your hands in the first place to make the mix … but let's leave it there.)
She and her generation had been trained by experts to take and share content, and to unhesitatingly share their data and privacy back: what's yours is mine, what's mine is yours.
My philosophical battle with Winnie is on my mind because we stand at the brink of a generational fight over the importance of IP and its value to the creator, and I have a terrible feeling that if you are 50 or older, then we are going to be fighting this on our own.
In an interim report released this week, the Productivity Commission has put forward a bold proposal: a text and data mining exception to the Australian Copyright Act. Put simply, this would legalise using Australian copyrighted material to train AI large language models — ChatGPT and the like. The proposal aims to slot AI training into the existing "fair dealing" exceptions already built into copyright law.
Why is this on the table now? Because the commission sees a potential windfall for the Australian economy — an estimated $116 billion over the next decade — fuelled by developments in AI and digital tech. Harnessing data this way isn't just about innovation, the commission says, it's about a very real shot at economic growth.
Ah, growth! The sole defining feature of a successful modern economy. Even at a time with the failures of late-stage capitalism collapsing around us like the special effects of a Marvel movie we cling to this as the only ideal, the only aim. And, in service to this ideal, the commission would like us to be comfortable with trading away the few financial benefits that come from original creativity.
Once again, I am aghast. Artists have already had to make the worst deal of their lives with streaming services, trading away what would have been worth a fortune, even during the "bad" old days of big, bad record labels. Please watch this interview with songwriter Julianna Zachariou,
who adds up live on air what she makes from a Spotify stream, and you'll never feel the same about your music streaming services. She's talking about numbers that, as sold records as part of a decent contract, would have made her an actual millionaire in the 1970s.
This new proposal means taking away, for free, the one and only thing that creatives make and from which they can make money. We should all be astonished at the suggestion.
I know I'm not surprising you with this point of view: you would expect someone like me who spends their time celebrating original creativity to be appalled at the notion that the copyrighted work of creatives can be used as literal free food into the aforementioned maws of Big Tech to enable them to get even richer.
More than 50,000 people have called for an end to the unlicensed use of creative work to train generative AI models.
As someone who struggles mightily with the existing "fair dealing" provisions in producing the ABC TV show Creative Types — we have to tie ourselves in knots justifying the use of 45 seconds of a film even when it's part of a relevant, thoughtful, highly analytical discussion about the detail of said copyrighted work, and mostly we can't get there because of the law's restrictions. It infuriates me that content-making like mine will remain hard, while self-enriching will get easier for the behemoths.
The move seems so foolish that opposing seems self-evident. That's when you know it'll probably get through. On countless subjects, including even the safety of children, Big Tech has escaped unsanctioned and unregulated. Of course, they've managed to persuade institutions like the Productivity Commission that getting more for nothing is in everyone's interests.
Since those childhood days, younger Australians like my Winnie have stepped back from total absorption by the online world: she is protective of her privacy. And she is also as angry as me at how little this digital world has benefited the hard work of the musicians she loves.
But the machines and those who run them have the whip hand now. Decades after Isaac Asimov predicted his happy world where "machines will do the work that makes life possible and that human beings will do all the other things that make life pleasant and worthwhile" we have finally made the trades that allow it. But it looks like we may have forgotten his most important qualifier. Asimov had a condition for this reality: "a properly automated and educated world."
In our rush to hand off the work that we imagine to be a waste of our time, we've failed to educate ourselves on the real consequences. Asimov never wanted the consequences of his predicted world to be one without art.
This weekend we have some wonderful writing for you on maps, gold,
libraries and there's new music to share too — just make sure you pay for it at some stage.
Have a safe and happy weekend and here's some new music, a dream-pop song, from that true original, Chappell Roan, who isn't the kind of person to hand off any of her work for free — maybe the generation worm will turn. Go well. |
