Scott Farquhar has waded further into the debate about AI and copyright under Australian law, saying he would have been happy if a company had taken Atlassian’s IP in its early days if it created a “transformative” technology with it.
“I think the benefits of the large language models that we have outweigh those issues,” he told the ABC’s Sarah Ferguson during its 7.30 news program.
Farquhar stepped down from his role as joint Atlassian CEO last year.
Ferguson pressed Farquhar on his stance, asking if he believed the benefits of the large language models outweigh the rights of artists to create “distinct Australian content”.
“I think you’re asking me do I think these models training themselves on the entire internet, yes I think there are benefits to that. We’ll have to work out what fair use is for these AI models. I don’t think it is nothing, that they can’t do anything, I also don’t think that you can replicate an existing artist. I don’t think that’s fair use either,” he said.
Farquhar was on the show to promote the economic potential of AI ahead of next week’s productivity roundtable. At the moment, Australia has no explicit provisions for ‘fair use’ in the context of AI. As such, the scraping of content for training large language models is in something of a legal grey area. Farquhar has said this harms investment in Australia.
Ferguson pressed Farquhar further, asking whether if it would be fair if someone else had used Atlassian’s IP to create an “iteration” of the business without recompense to him.
“If it was a new and novel way, then that’s fair… If it had been transformative yes. If someone had used my intellectual property to compete with me then I think that’s an issue. If they had used all the intellectual property of all the software in the world to help people write software better in the future, I think that’s fair use,” said Farquhar.
Ferguson pointed to Peter Garrett, frontman of rock band Midnight Oil’s criticism of proposed copyright changes, and asked whether individual artists should be able to opt-out of having their content used to train AI.
“Let me give you an example,” said Farquhar, “20 years ago when iPods came out, it was illegal to take a CD that you owned and put that music on an iPod you owned, because it was illegal in the Copyright Act. These days, we’d say that seems silly.”
“But you’ve paid for that at some point in the chain, haven’t you?” replied Ferguson.
“In the case of Midnight Oil, no one is paying them anything to use their songs.”
Farquhar equated that to the ABC not paying the people it quotes in news stories, adding that if you wanted to copy Midnight Oil and reproduce their songs that would be unfair but that there were plenty of artists who had been inspired—using air quotes—by those who came before them.
“But most of them had bought that Bob Dylan album that inspired them. They’re not expecting to use all of that material for free along the way. At some point Bob Dylan got paid to write his album,” said Ferguson.
“I’d have to look at that these days in terms of how that all works,” replied Farquhar.
