Screenrights has been ensuring that creators get paid when their work is used by educators, government, and retransmitters for decades. Now, we are supporting a way forward for the AI era in the form of Extended Collective Licensing.
WHAT IS EXTENDED COLLECTIVE LICENSING (ECL)?
ECL is an internationally recognised, market-friendly model proposed as a new option for managing copyright material used to train AI systems in Australia. It represents a pragmatic and fair compromise, offering rightsholders, particularly small and individual creators, a streamlined mechanism to negotiate fair remuneration and other terms for AI uses that would otherwise be impractical to license.
Critically, for rightsholders who wish to maintain absolute control over their work, ECL is a voluntary framework that allows them to manage their rights directly if they prefer. Unlike a compulsory statutory licence, ECL preserves the individual’s right to negotiate directly with AI developers or to simply withhold permission for their work to be used in AI training, thus ensuring creators retain a strong element of control over their valuable intellectual property.
The collective licensing model is already familiar in Australia with collecting societies such as Screenrights, APRA or CAL negotiating licences on behalf of their members. ECL is a collective rights management framework, which has been used successfully since the 1960s in countries like Sweden to manage collective licensing. It was endorsed by the European Union in 2019.
The key feature of an ECL framework is that legislation allows this licence to be extended by law to cover those who own copyright in the same category of material without requiring all copyright owners to sign up to the licence, while allowing rightsholders that wish to manage their rights directly to do so. The extension is governed by an authorisation process, similar to that currently applied by the ACCC for collecting societies like APRA.
What is Screenrights Doing About This?
Screenrights is advocating for the Australian Government to adopt an ECL model for Generative AI licensing. A survey of Screenrights members demonstrated a clear gap between willingness on the one hand and perceived resources and/or ability on the other hand amongst those who are open to licensing to AI developers.
Our position is that ECL is the most efficient and pragmatic means to preserve copyright owners’ rights, and supports fair remuneration for copyright owners while facilitating the continuation of tech innovation. What we don’t want to see is a return to demands for a Text and Data Mining (TDM) Exception, which the Government ruled out in October 2025 but may be revisited under pressure from the tech sector if the industry doesn’t come up with a workable licensing model. You can read more about our position on a TDM Exception here, and on our support of ECL here.
How Can I Get Involved?
The best way that you can support this work at the moment is to sign up to our e-newsletter (above) so that we can keep you in the know about developments. If you can help us educate the industry about ECL and how it works, be sure to get in touch.