Joint statement from local creator groups including AMPAL, APRA AMCOS, ARIA PPCA, Australian Publishers Association, Australian Society of Authors, Australian Writers’ Guild, AWG Authorship Collecting Society, Copyright Agency and Screenrights
Australian authors, songwriters, recording artists, visual artists, photographers, illustrators, playwrights, screenwriters and producers are in the sights of the country’s most powerful education bureaucracies.
State and territory education departments and private schools, backed by a taxpayer-funded lobbying operation, are pushing to expand copyright exceptions well beyond agreed amendments to the Copyright Act, and it is creators who will pay the price.
The Copyright Advisory Group (CAG), staffed by government lawyers, funded by taxpayers, and representing the combined weight of every state and territory government and every major private, Catholic and independent school, is seeking concessions that go significantly further than what the Australian Government consulted on, agreed to and introduced into Parliament.
The intent of the Bill was clear: To confirm that an existing exception allowing copyright material to be used in classrooms without payment applies equally in online settings. The Explanatory Memorandum is explicit and the amendments were not intended to touch existing licensing arrangements. The Senate inquiry agreed, recommending the Bill pass as drafted.
But now, the education sector wants more.
The education sector spends more on cleaning schools each year than it pays to access the entirety of human creative output. And still, its position is that this is not enough. The answer is not to take money from some of the lowest-paid workers in the country.
For just under $30 per student per year, every student in every Australian school has access to everything ever created, every book ever written, virtually every song ever recorded, every image ever published, every article, every poem, every illustration, every play, every documentary or film ever made and every screenplay. Not a curated subset. Not a limited catalogue. Everything.
Teachers can copy it, share it, stream it in any classroom, in any format, online or in person, without seeking permission and without paying a cent beyond that flat annual fee. By any measure, it is one of the most comprehensive and accessible education licences anywhere in the world.
This is not the first time. The same arguments were deployed in 2016. They resurfaced during COVID-19, when the same lobby sought to use the pandemic as cover. They are now being run again, in perfect step with big tech’s push to weaken creator protections in the development of Artificial Intelligence.
The timing, each time, is not coincidental. The target, each time, is the same. The earnings of artists and creators who have no comparable institutional power, no government funding, and no capacity to absorb further cuts to their income.
The author whose book is being copied, the songwriter and recording artist whose work is being streamed in a classroom, the filmmaker and television creators whose work inspires, the illustrator whose images fill the curriculum already provide access for a sum that would not buy a single textbook or a school uniform shirt. Asking creators to carry costs that are not theirs to bear is not progress. It is cost-shifting dressed up as principle.
Local Australian creator groups AMPAL, APRA AMCOS, ARIA PPCA, Australian Publishers Association, Australian Society of Authors, Australian Writers’ Guild, AWG Authorship Collecting Society, Copyright Agency and
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