Authors Guild Joins Protests Challenging Change in Australian Copyright Law - Publishers Weekly

The Australian government has looked at the copyright question and landed on the elegantly self-serving answer: AI companies may use authors' work without a licence to build models, and the Authors Guild has joined a global effort to say otherwise. Note that the legislation doesn't merely permit the taking — it would preempt the lawsuits authors have already filed against AI companies. Which is the sort of clause you write when you'd rather legislate the plaintiffs out of the room than argue with them. "Without a licence" is four words doing an enormous amount of quiet lifting.

Then comes the concession: opt-outs, planned by the government, which the Guild describes as "difficult to implement" and "no substitute for copyright's opt-in licensing." Difficult to implement rather in the way that asking every novelist on Earth to personally notify every model trainer is difficult to implement. Opt-in means somebody asks you first. Opt-out means somebody helps themselves and you get to spend your evenings in a portal registering your objection, assuming you can find the portal. One of these is a licensing regime; the other is a suggestion box with a legal annex stapled to it.

And the sequencing is the tell. Having set the terms, the legislation reaches back to smother the litigation already under way — a preemption clause is a mulligan with a drafting fee attached. The Guild is described as joining a "global effort," which is what you call it when the argument has already been lost in several jurisdictions and everyone is comparing notes. The pattern runs like clockwork: capability ships, statute arrives to ratify it, and the people who supplied the raw material get a consultation and a PDF explaining how to opt out. Opt-in licensing was never technically hard. It was just never the plan.