Starting from February 2025, Copyright Agency will extend its Annual Business Licence to cover staff of licensed businesses who:
- include third party material in prompts for AI tools
- copy and share outputs from AI tools with colleagues
Examples of how the licence extension will apply
Share with colleagues an output from an AI tool that includes some third party content
| Staff of licensed businesses can currently: | End-user extension would allow staff of licensed businesses to use an AI tool to: |
| Write a summary of a journal article for a report to senior management | Include a journal article in a prompt for an AI tool to produce a summary, and include the summary in a report to senior management |
| Write a report based on newspaper articles for a team meeting | Include newspaper articles in a prompt for an AI tool to produce a report, and share the report with colleagues for a team meeting |
| Create a graph from information in a book for a Board report | Include an excerpt from a book in a prompt for an AI tool to produce a graph from information in the excerpt, and include the graph in a Board report |
| Create a powerpoint slidedeck from a number of documents for an online meeting with colleagues | Include documents in a prompt for an AI tool to produce a powerpoint slidedeck, and show the presentation online to colleagues |
| Share with colleagues a document created by a staff member that includes some third party content | Share with colleagues an output from an AI tool that includes some third party content |
Licence conditions
The conditions will include:
- copying and sharing only within the licensed business, and business takes steps to ensure that material is not captured outside the workplace (e.g. by an external AI tool)
- only one chapter or 10% of a book, or one article from a journal issue
- business cannot use licence to replace purchase of an available subscription or product
- licence does not apply to any material that contains Indigenous Cultural or Intellectual Property
- licence does not override prohibitions in the Copyright Act against circumventing technological protection measures or removing rights management information
The licence will not allow
- works to be used in training (e.g. large language models)
- compiling datasets, from inputs or outputs, for use in training, fine-tuning, augmenting or validating AI tools
- text and data mining
- creating products that are sold
Webinar on Annual Business Licence extension
You can see the recording of our webinar on the Annual Business Licence extension here.
Questions about the Annual Business Licence extension?
If you have questions that have not been answered in our Q&As, you can let us know here.
Need more information?
- How third party content can be used in prompts for generative AI tools
- Why Copyright Agency is licensing use of AI tools
- Managing participation in Annual Business Licence extension to staff use of AI tools
- Statutory licences for education and government and AI-related activities
- Q&As from members about Extension of Annual Business Licence to staff use of AI tools
- Links to information on broader AI issues (AI and Copyright in Australia)
November 2024
Share Tweet