7 August 2025
Thursday 7 August 2025: Australian creative workers and their royalty collecting societies expressed disappointment at the Productivity Commission’s advocacy for a text and data mining (TDM) exception, a move that would retroactively legalise the theft of Australia’s creative workers’ intellectual property, voices, images, and work, by foreign multi-nationals. The interim report “Harnessing data and digital technology” seeks feedback…
8 September 2025
The American Authors Guild has provided an update on the Bartz v. Anthropic lawsuit, advising that an agreement to settle has been reached. The class action lawsuit was filed by author plaintiffs against Anthropic, alleging the AI firm used copyrighted books downloaded from pirate websites to train its Large Language Model (LLM). It has been reported that Anthropic has agreed to…
27 August 2025
Screen Producers Australia (SPA) has issued a Fact Sheet on writers and superannuation. SPA has argued that production companies are merely purchasing a writer’s intellectual property in a script, and that they are not engaging writers to “perform services” i.e. writing services. We do not consider this argument to be a sound one. The characterisation of writing contracts in this…
6 August 2025
The Australian Writers’ Guild (AWG) and Australian Writers’ Guild Authorship Collecting Society (AWGACS) have rejected the suggestion that a Text and Data Mining (TDM) Exception for the training of AI models be considered by the government, and expressed disappointment at the Productivity Commission’s interim report. The report “Harnessing data and digital technology” seeks feedback on…
