Australian Authors and Publishers Tell AI Inquiry: No Opt-Out

Who spoke to Australia's AI inquiry on Wednesday? A panel from the book trade. On October 21, 2026, in Sydney, the Parliament's Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence heard from Australian Publishers Association (APA) chief executive Patrizia Di Biase-Dyson and head of policy Stuart Glover, Australian Society of Authors (ASA) chief executive Lucy Hayward, Hachette Australia chief executive Louise Stark, and the authors Charlotte Wood, Anna Funder and Markus Zusak.

Both associations posted their statements the same day: the APA's statement, the ASA's opening statement, and an ASA report on the hearing with the authors' remarks. Their message was the same: do not loosen copyright law to make AI training easier.

What the publishers asked for

The APA opened by welcoming the committee's letter to the Prime Minister "supporting creators' control and payment." It then asked the committee to "reconsider your advice to change copyright law to facilitate AI licensing." PT reported on that advice and the publishers' first response in Australian Publishers Push Back on AI Copyright Advice.

The APA's case was that licensing is already happening. "Opt-ins are working," the statement says, citing HarperCollins including "around 200 Australian authors in a recent opt-in training agreement" and smaller Australian publishers "striking deals with global AI developers for reference and nonfiction content." It put the broader AI training dataset market at A$3.7 billion in 2024. It said statutory schemes with an opt-out would undermine that market, and that crawler instructions such as robots.txt "cannot solve this."

It suggested questions for the committee to put to developers: "Which Australian licences did you seek? What did you offer? Why did negotiations fail?" And: "AI refusal to pay does not establish market or regulatory failure."

The statement ended with four requests:

1. Reject statutory copying with unworkable opt-outs.
2. Require transparency, attribution and affordable remedies.
3. Support opt-in licensing, including machine-readable terms, especially for smaller publishers.
4. Publish policy proposals and their legal and economic assessments for consultation before any change to copyright.

The APA said it has 220 members and that the book industry turns over $4 billion a year, with more than 30,000 jobs.

What the authors' society asked for

The ASA's opening statement was blunter. It said overseas AI companies had taken copyright material, "much of it from pirate websites," to train models they now sell. It said those companies face "over 150 lawsuits in the US alone" and have signed "over 200 licensing deals for AI training to date," licensing where "they've judged the legal and commercial risks are too high."

"Don't water down our copyright laws with an opt-out scheme or otherwise," the statement says. "Instead, uphold, enforce, and reinforce our copyright law." The ASA asked the government to clarify the importation provisions in copyright law and to introduce statutory damages, giving creators leverage "to compel licensing in this jurisdiction, irrespective of where an AI model is trained." Its hearing report says its submission proposed that the importation provisions expressly include AI models.

Hayward told the committee: "We cannot be so indoctrinated by tech exceptionalism as to believe the largest companies on the planet cannot possibly obey our laws."

What the authors said

The ASA's report quotes all three authors. Charlotte Wood said licensing "happens every day," through publishers and collecting agencies. "It is careful work, but it is not complicated. When the AI companies claim it is impossible, they are lying to you."

Anna Funder said: "The AI companies need to come to the table and make licensing deals, like everyone else who wishes to use our work, which is our property."

Markus Zusak said that "if we don't fight for it now, it won't be that long till there's almost nothing left to fight for at all."

The ASA links a recording of the hearing from its report. The committee has also heard from AI developers; PT covered Anthropic's evidence in Anthropic: Australian Copyright Law Blocks Local AI Training.

Why it matters for authors

Australia is weighing whether to change copyright law for AI training, and the options on the table include an opt-out scheme. Under an opt-out, the burden falls on rights holders to stop use of their work rather than on developers to ask first. Both the publishers and the authors' society now say, on the record and in the same hearing, that they want an opt-in model with transparency and real remedies.

That matters outside Australia too. The APA notes that publisher associations in the UK, US, France, Germany and Brazil, along with the International Publishers Association and STM, have raised the same concerns with the Australian government. Any author whose books are sold, or copied, in Australia has a stake in which model wins. Authors who want to weigh in can follow the committee's page for its report and any further hearings.