After months of united pressure from artists, writers, musicians, unions and advocates like you, the Australian Government has officially reversed its plan to weaken copyright law for Big Tech.

This is a historic moment. Together, we stopped a proposal that would have allowed AI companies to scrape, copy and profit from Australian creative work without consent, credit or compensation.

Attorney-General Michelle Rowland confirmed over the weekend that the government will not introduce a “text and data mining” exemption, which would have handed multinational tech companies the right to use our creative work for free.

“We will not be enabling the use of Australian creative work for free, without permission, and basically without risk of infringement.” – Michelle Rowland, Attorney-General

The creative community spoke with one voice:
 • NAVA, representing more than 50,000 artists and arts workers, warned that this change would devastate the visual arts sector.
 • ARIA, the Australian Society of Authors, Creative Australia and the ACTU stood together in opposition.
 • Author Kirli Saunders powerfully called it “a risk of double colonisation” for First Nations artists.

Your voices, our collective outrage and persistence, made this happen.

But we cannot stop here. This decision protects creative work, not our likenesses. Right now, Australia has no specific law aimed at preventing the unauthorised use of your image.

Copyright law is of little help in these cases because the person who owns the copyright in an image is usually the creator of it, such as the photographer, not the person who appears in the image. This means that if your likeness, body or face is copied, used or even replicated by AI without your permission, you have very limited legal protection.

Denmark is already moving forward with landmark legislation to protect individuals’ likeness and identity in the age of generative AI, and Australia must follow.

This is about more than copyright. It is about human rights, consent and control over our own image.

Let us keep the pressure on until Australia becomes a global leader in ethical AI.

Sign and share this petition to demand that likeness and identity protections are written into Australian law, so that no one’s image, voice or creative work can ever be taken, used or sold without their consent.

This is what collective action looks like. We made them listen on copyright, and together we will expand those rights!