{"id":788389,"date":"2026-07-09T03:58:23","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T03:58:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/788389\/"},"modified":"2026-07-09T03:58:23","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T03:58:23","slug":"country-musician-jeanette-wormald-experiences-copyright-dispute-and-ai-website-woes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/788389\/","title":{"rendered":"Country musician Jeanette Wormald experiences copyright dispute and AI website woes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Musician Jeanette Wormald says she “got the shock of my life” when she discovered her former website contained AI information and images that had been scraped from the internet, along with links to international medical sites and peptides products.<\/p>\n

“I got the shock of my life to see an AI-generated image representing me of a woman in a cowboy hat with long golden locks with the typical ChatGPT tonal qualities,” she told ABC Far North.<\/p>\n

“I felt quite gutted physically and mentally.”<\/p>\n

The 2007 Golden Guitar finalist had an official website with a “.com” domain name but about three years ago, replaced it with a “.com.au” domain.<\/p>\n

She did not renew her “.com” website and during a recent online search discovered that it had been taken over by AI.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

A screenshot from the fake Jeanette Wormald website, featuring an unintelligible album cover with a three-armed cartoon cowgirl holding an unknown object. (Supplied: Jeanettewormald.com)<\/p>\n

The site contained a disclaimer that it was not an official site but a “tribute” to Wormald for education and informational purposes.<\/p>\n

“The content draws from publicly available sources including historical archives, published reviews, and official announcements about awards and achievements,” the website said.<\/p>\n

The website’s claims include mention of “significant physical demands” of performing arts and provides links to the American College of Sports Medicine, Healthline, and the Cleveland Clinic, as well as to a company selling peptides in the United States.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

The links to the US peptides site on the community section of the fake Jeanette Wormald website. Peptides are available by prescription only in Australia. (Supplied: Jeanettewormald.com)<\/p>\n

Wormald referred the matter to the Australasian Performing Right Association and the Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners Society (APRA AMCOS).<\/p>\n

In its response, seen by the ABC, APRA AMCOS said the unauthorised website was “alarming”, a breach of her legal copyright, and referred the musician to pursue a Takedown Notice<\/a> via Arts Law Centre of Australia.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Jeanette Wormald will be hosting a live concert in Kuranda next month to raise awareness of musicians under attack from artificial intelligence. (Supplied: Adelaide Fringe Festival)<\/p>\n

Wormald said within days of discovering the website, she also found copyright infringement discrepancy notices on her YouTube back-end dashboard in relation to three videos from her 2014 Inland Moon album.<\/p>\n

Wormald said YouTube on Tuesday resolved the matter by persuading a third-party “to release their claim” over the three songs.<\/p>\n

But if it were unsuccessful, she said the claims would have denied her any income from the videos.<\/p>\n

She believed the YouTube copyright claim and the website issues were unrelated.<\/p>\n

“I’m trying to work out why it’s happened to little old me. I feel like I’m in a science fiction movie or something,” Wormald said.<\/p>\n

“I really thought I was yesterday’s news, but obviously somebody could see a monetary value in who I am and what I represent and are trying to use it to their advantage.”<\/p>\n

\"posed<\/p>\n

Louise Buckingham says creatives need to be vigilant in the face of AI. (ABC News: Liam Patrick)<\/p>\n

Get ready for the takedown<\/p>\n

Wormald is pursuing the Takedown Notice for the website through the Arts Law Centre of Australia.<\/p>\n

Louise Buckingham, the chief executive of the Sydney-based centre, said generative AI was an increasing problem for creatives trying to maintain ownership of their work.<\/p>\n

Dr Buckingham said the centre was seeing an increasing number of artists having to defend their work and enforce their rights.<\/p>\n

“The key guiding principle is to maintain vigilance around the kind of platforms and systems that host music, but other art forms as well,” Dr Buckingham said.<\/p>\n

She urged artists to be aware of misuse, accusations and false allegations of infringement.<\/p>\n

\"X\"<\/p>\n

Kathy Bowrey says it is difficult to successfully prosecute copyright infringement. (Supplied: UNSW)<\/p>\n

Kathy Bowery, an expert on intellectual property and professor of law at the University of New South Wales, said AI scraping was a “deceptive and misleading practice”.<\/p>\n

She said it was difficult to successfully prosecute copyright infringement.<\/p>\n

“It’s usually beyond the financial means of artists, and there’s no guarantee that the entity is actually going to have any actual assets or anything that gives you any damages,” Professor Bowery said.<\/p>\n

“And it’s also really digging a pit to actually make it impossible for artists to survive in a kind of new digital future with AI because AI then continues to scrape all that content.<\/p>\n

“That perpetuates these types of frauds and wrongs.”<\/p>\n

\"Musicians<\/p>\n

The Jeanette Wormald Trio with bass player Dave Hart and guitarist Paul Vandersar. (Supplied: Steven Nowakowski)<\/p>\n

She said significant law reform was needed to protect artists.<\/p>\n

“Everyone’s acknowledging that it’s a problem for artists, but they’re not really having conversations that put into place any new systems or any new protections and any new responsibilities on AI companies,” she said.<\/p>\n

The federal attorney-general’s office has been contacted for comment.<\/p>\n

\"Musicians<\/p>\n

The Jeanette Wormald Trio has been performing together for about a decade. (Supplied: Steven Nowakowski)<\/p>\n

Wormald has vowed to focus on live performances, and has organised a “reclaim our rights” concert in Kuranda next month to highlight the importance of original music.<\/p>\n

“As a survivor of things like domestic violence and being shut down for speaking out about women’s issues and things that are so important to me, this feels like a violation, like my voice has been taken away,” she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Musician Jeanette Wormald says she “got the shock of my life” when she discovered her former website contained…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":788390,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[3443,256,254,255,191545,64,63,184729,81092,371933,371936,90242,8887,371938,371937,371934,371935,105,3973],"class_list":["post-788389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-adelaide","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-atherton-tablelands","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-catfishing","tag-cloning","tag-content-scraping","tag-dave-hart","tag-fnq","tag-identity-theft","tag-jeanette-wormald","tag-paul-van-dersar","tag-phoenixing","tag-scamming","tag-technology","tag-youtube"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788389","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=788389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788389\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/788390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=788389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=788389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=788389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}