It’s not everyday you’ll find News Corp and one of rival Nine Entertainment’s mastheads openly in agreement, but that’s what has happened following an opinion piece by former ACCC chief Rod Sims.
News Australasia’s executive chairman Michael Miller has taken to LinkedIn to voice his agreement with Sims who, as chair of the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission – until March 2022 – presided over scrutiny of ‘Big Tech’ companies Google and Facebook.
In Nine’s Australian Financial Review, Sims said that it was unreasonable for people to source news from AI-generated sources, “while expecting Australian media businesses to produce these stories without the revenue to cover the cost”.
On LinkedIn, Miller says the piece is “worth a read”.
“Rod understands the important role that professionally created news media plays in strong democracies, and the keystone of commercial negotiation for agreeing the use of and payment for news content in digital and AI platforms and services.”
The comments follow discussion about prospective changes to copyright laws which had been established to protect creative works. But Sims says, “There is nothing creative about AI not paying for news content”.
He dismisses the argument that Australia “will miss out on huge AI investment particularly in data centres”, noting that data centres actually employ very few people.
Continuing use of Australian data without paying for it is not a short-term “training” process, and while “Australia’s copyright laws provide a sound basis for requiring payment, they provide a hopeless framework for determining what that payment should be,” Sims says.
He says the idea of giving large AI companies the access to Australian media stories they need to operate effectively “without paying for it, or paying a token amount” is outrageous.
“If this is allowed, most people will get their media stories from AI and Australian media businesses will be expected to incur the cost of producing these stories without the revenue to cover these costs,” says Sims.
As there was before introduction of the news media bargaining code, Sims says there is a market failure, “due to the market power of the dominant AI companies”.
He adds that instead of creating content, the AI companies “do not provide content, they aggregate the content of others in increasingly clever ways. This is not Schumpeterian ‘creative destruction’ that sees the old replace the new; this is simply destruction of news businesses without a replacement.”
He stresses, “news media businesses matter. Bloggers and the like do not replace the need for the profession of journalism”. Government action is needed to ensure news media businesses are paid commercially and fairly for AI companies’ access to Australian news. “Only the government can bring this outcome about with appropriate legislation as occurred when the NMBC was introduced. The ball is clearly in the government’s court.”
Michael Miller also visited the topic in a report piece in his company’s national daily The Australian – without mentioning the AFR – and said the country’s media industry was “at a crossroads” in what will prove a “make or break year”.
He said the sector was confronting “the potentially devastating consequences of copyright theft by AI companies, the ongoing uncertainty surrounding the regulation of the big tech platforms, and the increasing likelihood that some news outlets will fold”.
Comments that “federal government must prioritise its investment in the ‘infrastructure of public discourse’,” were accompanied by a picture of himself with prime minister Anthony Albanese (above, photo John Feder).