Music rights group says AI firms trained on Australian songs without pay, pressuring government
AI companies have used songs by Australian artists such as Kylie Minogue and Nick Cave to train models without compensation, prompting the International Confederation of Music Publishers to warn the Australian government against weakening copyright rules.
The International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP), which represents Sony, Warner, Universal and thousands of independents, alleges that AI developers have already trained models on Australian music without paying rights holders, naming tracks by Kylie Minogue, Nick Cave, G-Flip and others. ICMP’s managing director John Phelan warned that tech firms are “strong-arming” Australian policymakers, threatening to pull investment unless copyright protections are softened.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese previously called unlicensed use “theft,” and a parliamentary committee on artificial intelligence has reopened the debate, noting a stalemate over whether AI can train on copyrighted works without compensation. Evidence presented to the committee includes a spreadsheet of millions of YouTube songs and a dataset of over 12 million tracks, showing Google’s Gemini reproducing Australian lyrics.
Representatives from Anthropic and OpenAI testified that licensing every piece of content is impractical and that U.S. fair-use doctrine supports their approach. The ICMP cautioned that Australia’s decision could set a global precedent, as no other country among the 62 surveyed has adopted a commercial text-and-data-mining exception.
Why it matters
It could reshape how creators are paid for AI training and set an international precedent for copyright law.
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