The Business Council of Australia drafted then buried a plan to exempt AI training from copyright — creative communities read the leak as proof of the backroom deal they suspected all along.
For months, creative communities argued that AI companies and their allies were pursuing copyright reform through backchannels rather than transparent policy processes. The Business Council of Australia's draft submission — proposing to amend the Copyright Act so AI training on copyrighted works would no longer constitute infringement — is the clearest evidence yet that this suspicion was accurate. The proposal leaked via Crikey's Cameron Wilson after the Council quietly dropped it, meaning the document arrived in public not as a live policy proposal but as proof of a path that was attempted and abandoned. That sequence — draft, drop, leak — is what gave the story its force: the failure of the quiet approach became the public record of the quiet approach.
The Business Council's draft did not emerge from a vacuum. It followed OpenAI's direct lobbying of Australian Treasury, in which the company framed copyright reform as a prerequisite for $115 billion in economic gains — a projection that Treasury's own public servants assessed as unsubstantiated. Media and entertainment industry leaders had already responded to that lobbying push by publicly characterizing the investment threats from OpenAI and Anthropic as fabricated leverage designed to extract statutory exemptions without payment. The Council's proposal landed after that counter-mobilization was already underway, which means the draft had less political cover than its authors likely anticipated. The sequence reveals a coordinated industry strategy — lab lobbying followed by business-council legislative drafting — that rights-holders had enough warning to name before it fully materialized.
The political environment in which the Business Council's proposal leaked was already moving in the opposite direction. Assistant Technology Minister Andrew Charlton provided the clearest government signal yet that Labor intends to overhaul copyright to give rights holders more power to pursue AI companies — Charlton's statement that the copyright status quo is not working arrived almost simultaneously with the Crikey story. The collision of those two moments — a leaked industry proposal to weaken copyright and a ministerial signal to strengthen it — means the Council did not just lose the quiet path; it actively contributed to the political momentum against its preferred outcome. A proposal designed to avoid debate generated the precise conditions for one.
The game industry has been running a parallel version of this accountability process at the asset level. The Crimson Desert case [9] — where developer denials about AI-generated art were undercut by community members comparing launch assets against patched replacements [19] — demonstrates a pattern of practice that makes corporate communications more costly. This is not incidental to the copyright debate; it is the same dispute in a different medium. The communities that developed the habit of documenting, comparing, and publicly disclosing AI asset use in shipped games are now applying the same method to legislative processes. What happened to the Business Council's draft — drafted quietly, dropped, then exposed — followed the same logic: the attempt to avoid public scrutiny became the public record. The counter-infrastructure is already in place, and it is practiced.
The Business Council's ambition was a clean statutory amendment that would have resolved the AI training question without a public fight. That outcome is no longer available. The leak generated exactly the public fight the Council was trying to avoid, and the government's response has moved in the direction rights-holders were demanding. The creative industries that treated the leaked document as a receipt rather than a revelation were correct in their assessment: the policy fight was already underway, the industry's preferred path was already being blocked, and the draft's exposure simply confirmed what the mobilization against OpenAI's lobbying had already established. The lobby will not get a quiet fix — the next attempt will require a public argument it has already shown it cannot win on the merits.
The story so far
The Business Council's leaked copyright proposal has shifted Australia's AI policy debate from industry consultation to parliamentary contest — creative industries gained the receipts they needed, and the lobby lost the quiet path it was counting on.
Methodology
This story was generated autonomously from 20 source records. An editorial model synthesizes, weights, and cites each source. No human editorial judgment was applied.