Atlassian cofounder Scott Farquhar said he wouldn’t mind if others took the $60 billion tech company’s intellectual property without paying for it if it leads to better software.
The Tech Council of Australia chair, who stepped down as Atlassian co-CEO last year, but remains on the board, has been advocating for changes to Australian copyright laws to give artificial intelligence companies greater access to existing works without compensation to the rights holders.
Farquhar has been invited to federal treasurer Jim Chalmers’ productivity roundtable in Canberra next week and recently spoke at the National Press Club, putting the Tech Council’s case for AI and copyright changes. Key to his argument is the idea of “fair use”.
He believes AI companies, already among the most valuable in the world, even as they lose billions of dollars developing AI, should be allowed to train large language models on the intellectual property of others for free. He believes that in the case of musicians, it’s okay so as long as they don’t copy an artist directly.
“If people are going to sit down with a digital companion, an AI song creator, and they collaboratively work with an AI to create something new to the world, that’s probably fair use,” Farquhar, wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, told ABC TV’s Sarah Ferguson on 7.30.
He compared it to previous artists being inspired by others. Ferguson countered that at one stage, they at least bought the album rather than getting it for free.
Farquhar’s argument is a tightrope in terms who benefits and gets to commercialise preceding work.
And there’s a certain irony in the freedom he portrays of a more liberal approach to fair use in the US when the country’s courts have been filled with epic battles over intellectual property – from the latest fights over AI data scraping to the smartphone patent wars in the 2010s, the more recent Google v Oracle battle over operating systems and decades of chip patent wars – hello Intel v VLSI.
One could argue that while every instance were someone allegedly nicked the IP was to make something better, US courts and juries didn’t quite go for the “fair use” concept.
Big tech’s motto too often appears to be “free for me, pay for thee”.
When Ferguson said artists call what AI is doing with their work theft and was asked if he thought it should stop, Farquhar replied: “I think that the benefits of the large language models and so forth that we’ve got outweigh like, you know, those issues.”
Ferguson responded: “So hang on, you’re saying that the benefits of the large language models outweigh the rights of individual Australian artists to create distinct Australian content?”
Farquhar replied: “Do I think that these models going out and training themselves on the entire internet? Yes, like I think there are benefits to that. We have to work out what is fair use for these AI models.”
Ferguson probed the idea of fair use to ask the billionaire if, when he created Atlassian, “if another business had come along, a new business, a new iteration of the way business is done, to use your own intellectual property without recompense to you, would you have regarded that as fair?”
“If it was a new and novel way, then that’s fair,” he said.
“You would have been happy to yield your intellectual property for no reward?… If someone had come along and taken that from you and used it to benefit themselves with no benefit to you, you would have thought that was fair?” Ferguson pressed.
“If it had been transformative, yes. If someone had used my intellectual property to compete with me, then I think that is an issue – directly with me. If they’d used all the intellectual property of all the software on the world to help people write software better in the future, I don’t think that. I think that is a fair use,” Farquhar replied.
Asked if anything in AI scares him, the Tech Council chair said: “there’s some crazy, out there scenarios of things that could happen in the future, but I think the chances are very low… I focus a lot on the positives.”
Watch the full interview with 7.30 host Sarah Ferguson below.
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