A few years ago, AI companies built their systems by feeding them enormous amounts of written, visual, and musical content from the internet. Most of that content belonged to someone. Very few creators were asked. Fewer were paid.
Australia came very close to making that arrangement permanent. A proposal presented to the government in mid-2025 would have given AI companies a legal right to use any copyrighted Australian content for training purposes, no permission needed. In return, companies would contribute to a $350 million per year fund for artists and commit to more than $50 billion in data centre investment across the country.
Creatives rejected it immediately. Musicians, authors, and publishers staged press conferences in parliament. Independent senator David Pocock called it the "ultimate dirty deal." The argument was straightforward: if a company profits from your work, you deserve a say in whether they use it and a share of what they earn from it.
The government held. In October 2025, Attorney-General Michelle Rowland confirmed there would be no exemption. AI companies would need to negotiate with rights holders and pay for access, the same as any other commercial user of someone else's work.
That decision had immediate consequences. A government working group began designing a paid licensing system, examining whether a collective framework, similar to how collecting societies distribute royalties in the music industry, could work for AI. The idea is that creators do not have to negotiate one-by-one with every AI company; instead, a central system tracks use and distributes payments.
The commercial deals are already taking shape without waiting for legislation. News Corp struck a deal with OpenAI worth over $250 million across five years. The Guardian signed with OpenAI. The Associated Press licensed content to Google. The Financial Times, Axel Springer, and Le Monde all reached agreements with various AI firms. Globally, AI companies paid an estimated $816 million per year in content licensing as of late 2024, a market that is growing.
This week, Microsoft and Nine announced the first deal of its kind between a major Australian news publisher and a global AI company. Microsoft's Copilot assistant will reference content from the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian Financial Review, and the Age during searches. It will display headlines and summaries and point users toward Nine's websites for the full story. Nine gets paid; Microsoft gets verified, up-to-date content to make its AI more accurate.
That structure matters for anyone who produces content professionally: verified, current, high-quality information is exactly what AI companies need most. Their systems trained on old data become unreliable quickly. Publishers and creators who keep producing fresh content have real leverage here.
The risk, though, is concentration. The deals announced so far almost exclusively involve large organisations: major newspapers, global publishing houses, and well-resourced music labels. Smaller operators, individual writers, independent musicians, and niche publishers have no clear path to the same table yet. The Australian government's working group is meant to address this, but the details of how small rights holders actually get paid remain unresolved.
For business operators outside media and entertainment, the pattern is still worth watching. The principle being established is that AI companies must pay for the professional content that makes their tools useful. That principle, if it holds, extends beyond journalism and music. Proprietary research, training materials, industry data, and specialist knowledge all have the same underlying logic: if an AI system learns from it and profits from it, the owner of that knowledge has a claim.