The Government is faced with an important choice in the Copyright Modernisation Review (the Review): to accept – or reject – the recommendations of the expert bodies that have weighed up the evidence and set out a roadmap for modernising and future proofing copyright law. Universities Australia strongly urges the Government to disregard the rhetoric that has been an unfortunate feature of the copyright reform debate in Australia to date, and to follow the evidence. There is a currently a stark mismatch between Australia’s education and innovation policy goals and what our inflexible copyright law actually permits. For example, the Government’s education and innovation policies each recognise the importance of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as machine learning and text and data mining technologies, in achieving Australia’s aim of being a world class research nation, and of being
counted in the top tier of innovation nations by 2030. AI and machine learning have been identified as a priority area for research by the Australian Research Council.