Copyright is critical but it won't fix productivity
Copyright has dominated discussions following the government's Economic Reform Roundtable. But it is not the main game for AI or productivity.
The federal government's Economic Reform Roundtable stepped onto the field at a time when the rules of the game are changing faster than anyone expected.
Unsurprisingly, the first headlines were about copyright.
The week’s supposed breakthrough between ACTU Secretary Sally McManus and Atlassian’s Scott Farquhar on paying for AI content dominated the coverage, but it far from nailed the point.
Creators, publishers and media organisations are right to be anxious: if training data is treated as a free-for-all, the entire creative economy could be undermined. Protecting copyright matters deeply. But all of this discourse – important as it is – is obscuring the far bigger challenge the roundtable was meant to be addressing.
The real productivity question for Australia isn’t whether AI models are trained fairly. It’s whether Australian businesses will ever be able to use them effectively enough to shift the dial on output, efficiency and competitiveness. That is the hidden risk in this debate. If government and business treat copyright as the whole story, they will have secured a fairer deal for artists, but leave the rest of the economy stranded on the margins of the AI revolution.
