Country Press Australia (CPA) has welcomed the federal government\u2019s decision to rule out a copyright exemption for AI companies, but says urgent action is now required to enforce copyright laws and stop AI platforms from stealing regional journalism.<\/p>\n
CPA president Damian Morgan said the damage to regional journalism is no longer hypothetical or distant, it is already occurring.<\/p>\n
\u201cAI companies think they are above the law,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are harvesting local news stories, paraphrasing them and delivering them back to users as answers rather than links.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe public still consumes the journalism, but they never reach the publisher, never subscribe and never see a local advertiser.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe reporting is ours, but the commercial benefit is captured by offshore technology companies.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr Morgan added that regional publishers now operate metered or hybrid paywalls to fund journalism, but AI scraping routinely bypasses those protections, further threatening the economic base needed to keep local journalists employed.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe problem is not only training data,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese platforms are now replacing the publisher in real time. They extract our reporting, convert it into their own output and keep the audience.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat removes the economic base needed to keep journalists employed in regional Australia.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Mr Morgan said the policy failure that occurred when Meta walked away from funding news must not be allowed to repeat itself in the AI era.<\/p>\n
\u201cGoogle has remained engaged with the industry, but Meta walked away while still benefiting from Australian journalism,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe cannot go through a second cycle where big tech uses regional reporting to drive engagement but refuses to fund the journalism that makes it possible.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf AI companies want to use Australian news, they must license it and pay for it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Country Press Australia \u2013 of which Sunshine Coast News and My Weekly Preview are members \u2013 is calling for a national framework that ensures licensing covers both training and output; that regional publishers are explicitly included alongside larger media companies; and that there is a low-cost, fast enforcement pathway for small publishers who cannot afford lengthy litigation.<\/p>\n
\u201cRegional journalism is not simply a commercial product,\u201d Mr Morgan said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is public infrastructure in democratic life. If scraping continues unchecked, local reporting will disappear not because communities don\u2019t value it, but because AI has siphoned away the audience and revenue that sustains it.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce a regional newsroom closes, there is no replacing it.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said the government had taken the right first step by rejecting a copyright carve-out for AI, but the next stage \u2013 licensing and enforcement \u2013 will determine whether regional publishing can remain viable.<\/p>\n
\u201cAustralia solved this problem once through the News Media Bargaining Code. We now need the AI equivalent before the harm becomes irreversible.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Country Press Australia (CPA) has welcomed the federal government\u2019s decision to rule out a copyright exemption for AI…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":270970,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":["post-270969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270969\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/270970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}