While you’re considering the implications of AI scamming of news publishers’ website content, a new copyright issue has appeared with urgent major consequences.

It follows a 2023 incident in which animal activists Farm Transparency Project broke into a slaughterhouse in Eurobin, Victoria, and shot video allegedly showing animal cruelty.

Australia’s federal court has apparently accepted the abattoir’s argument that they, and not the activist group, own copyright to the footage, and this is currently being challenged in the high court.

The outcome has implications for press freedom, as Peter Greste, now executive director of the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, has warned. The Guardian has reported that Greste's group and also the Human Rights Law Centre, have argued that their views should also be heard.

The full bench of the federal court's finding conflicts with the accepted argument that copyright is about the creation of the content, not the legality of the recording, and if accepted would set investigative journalism on its head.

Greste says the decision “risks giving those who want wrongdoing covered up additional legal ammunition to shutdown public interest journalism.

“The ruling was unprecedented and marks a significant, troubling development in Australian law. That is why we have sought leave to assist the high court with our public interest perspective on these issues.”

Kieran Pender, associate legal director of the Human Rights Law Centre, has added that the law “should not permit perpetrators of wrongdoing to use copyright law and equity to keep evidence of wrongdoing hidden and prevent third parties reporting on it”.

However, solicitor David Henderson says the Game Meats Company, “had not been found to have engaged in wrongdoing by any regulator or court” and that the activist group had obtained “by its trespass, and by its surreptitiously placed cameras,” the one thing the law of trespass most directly prevented it from obtaining.