Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar defends AI companies stealing intellectual property in trainwreck ABC interview

Sky News AU

a day ago

Co-founder of Atlassian Scott Farquhar has come under fire in a tense interview on the ABC's 7.30 program, where he was repeatedly pressed on whether AI companies should be allowed to use copyrighted material without compensating creators.
Farquhar appeared on the programme to promote the economic potential of artificial intelligence ahead of next week's productivity roundtable.
But the conversation with presenter Sarah Ferguson quickly turned to the growing anger among Australian artists, who argue their work is being exploited by tech giants.
ABC 730 presenter Sarah Ferguson. Picture: ABC
Former CEO of Atlassian Scott Farquhar. Picture: ABC
Defending calls for AI companies to receive exemptions under Australia's copyright laws, Farquhar tried to argue there was a reasonable fair use exemption.
'Copyright exists to basically give artists who create something a right to almost all the uses of it, and we have a thing called fair use. AI is a broad and transformative technology,' he told the ABC.
Currently, Australia lacks explicit provisions for 'fair use' in the context of AI, making the practice of scraping content for training language models legally murky.
Farquhar argued this uncertainty is harming investment.
'All AI usage of mining or searching or going across data is probably illegal under Australian law. And I think that hurts a lot of investment.'
Farquhar was then confronted with a hypothetical scenario involving his own intellectual property - with Ms Ferguson asking how we would feel if someone had copied the core of Atlassian to build a rival product without paying him.
'If it had been transformative, yes,' Farquhar said. 'If someone had used my intellectual property to compete with me, then I think that is an issue. If they'd used all the intellectual property of all the software on the world to help people write software better in the future, that is a fair use.'
The exchange raised eyebrows, particularly given his admission that artists like Midnight Oil should not necessarily be able to block the use of their work by AI companies.
When challenged that creators were not being paid, Farquhar replied that the "ABC doesn't pay people when they quote an article.'
When pressed further on whether the benefits of AI outweigh the rights of individual Australian creators, Farquhar pointed back to the idea of 'fair use'.
'Like, I think there are benefits to that. We have to work out what is fair use for these AI models,' he said.