When politicians talk about ‘reform’, I am instantly suspicious. If  the good Dr Samuel Johnson was right in defining patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel, and he probably was, reform must be the last refuge of politicians who want to big-note themselves, expand state power, diminish the rights of the individual, burden us with endless new regulations and make us cough up for the inevitable cost of the so-called reform through taxation. At the same time, reform rarely if ever improves anything: just look at the alleged reforms of the last 20 years and try to name any one of them that has improved your prosperity or happiness. Advocating a need for reform is such a warm and cuddly notion that, merely to suggest it, implies that the inevitable changes involved will be for the better, which they usually are not.

At the moment, we are faced with a particular threat of reform, namely alleged reform of the copyright law, a change which will harm most of those whom copyright presently protects.

First, what is copyright? It is a law that says that those who create ideas and put them into a permanent form have the right to say and control the way in which the created work can be re-produced. It is, if you like, the right to copy. It is of tremendous importance for writers, the media, photographers, artists, musicians, film producers, bands and in fact all creatives. Why is it important? Because it is the creators’ livelihood and it should be protected.

Copyright has suddenly taken on an immediate and substantial significance with the rise of artificial intelligence, AI, because those smart machines have an insatiable appetite for content and their algorithms are trained to suck up anything they want. That being so, the AI companies want an exemption from copyright law so they can help themselves to other peoples’ creations and re-produce them free of charge. It is of course very convenient for the AI companies to be able to do this because, whenever a curly question is bowled up to the AI juggernauts, they have an instant answer: just take what others have created and don’t pay for it.

This is now being done on an industrial basis, particularly in the media, making it difficult for a country like Australia to exercise the international power needed to protect the interests of Australian creatives.

In the light of that, the AI companies say that the copyright law should be ‘reformed’, so that material in the media and elsewhere on which they want to train their machines would be free from copyright protection altogether. This would be monstrous and would be a death knell for all creatives.

We have already had one go at solving this issue with the Coalition’s News Bargaining Code that provided for voluntary agreements between publishers and the companies that reproduce their content. A few such agreements were made under the Code, but they have now largely expired, will probably not be renewed and they applied only to news, while other creators were left out in the cold. Content creators are still not being compensated for what they produce.

The Albanese government has now come up with a new scheme with an even grander title, the News Bargaining Incentive and with even less likelihood of protecting and paying actual creators. This, believe it or not, will provide for republishing agreements to be made and, if not, for a tax be imposed on AI companies as a proportion of their revenue, with the charges collected to be distributed back to what the government coyly refers to as ‘the Australian news media sector to support the employment and critical work of journalists’. This is a terrible scheme, as it inserts the government into the media which should never be done, in any shape or form, leaves out all creatives but the news media, applies only to social media and search services and not to authors, academics and other creatives, will take too long to implement and is unbelievably vague on how much of the new tax will be distributed, to whom, and how the distribution will be contrived. Apart from anything else, how can self-respecting journalists be critical and honest news gatherers if they are on a drip-feed from the government and have to behave themselves?

Meanwhile, AI marches on and it will continue to suck up the creative effort of all publishers and artists and continue to fight for a wholesale exemption from the copyright law that masquerades under the weasel word of ‘reform’. If we do not move quickly to stop this from happening, there will be nothing left to copyright and the field will be open to the AI companies to scrape up whatever takes their fancy!

But there is a simple solution and it has none of the hare-brained denial of copyright to creatives that the AI industry wants to see and the Albanese government seems hell-bent on encouraging. My simple proposal for solving these disputes between those who have created the content on the other hand and AI, social media and other copiers on the other, is arbitration. Australia has a vigorous arbitration profession, internationally recognised and respected. Our arbitrators can easily arbitrate on what the AI and social media companies reasonably need, what the creators can reasonably expect to be paid and how it can be structured. And it would all be done with no new taxes and no greasing of the path of government to control the media. It would only require a simple change to the law and all sides would welcome it. A three-person panel, one from each of the former and the latter, and an independent and respected chair, would guarantee prompt and simple solutions that are fair to both sides. It might even give reform a good name.