AI's copyright capture cheerleader Scott Farquhar melts under the studio lights
Welcome to a midweek update from Unmade.
Today: Scott Farquhar’s TV meltdown; REmade’s program locks in; and a down day on the Unmade Index.
We’ve announced the schedule for this year’s Compass series. Our panel-in-the-pub, end-of-year tour kicks off in Sydney on November 3 and concludes in Hobart a fortnight later. Reflecting on 2025 and projecting into 2026, hold the date for your city:
November 3 – Compass Sydney
November 5 – Compass Brisbane
November 10 – Compass Adelaide
November 11 – Compass Perth
November 17 – Compass Melbourne
November 18 – Compass Hobart
Unmade’s paying members get a free ticket to Compass. Your annual membership also gets you tickets to September’s REmade conference on retail media; and to October’s Unlock conference on marketing in the nighttime economy.
And you also get access to our paywalled archive.
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Our new robot overlords need a better spokesman
Tim Burrowes writes:
It would be harsh, but not entirely inaccurate, to observe that Scott Farquhar’s contribution to the intellectual property debate has been ironically light on intellect.
On Monday night the co-founder of Atlassian showed up on the ABC’s 7.30. And although Sarah Ferguson dialled up her interrogation to no more than a six, the weakness of Farquhar’s argument that local copyright laws should be rewritten in order to make it easier for AI to data mine local content was obvious.
This is not merely a thought bubble. In recent days Farquhar, waving the flag as chair of the Tech Council of Australia, has been doing the rounds. A fortnight ago he showed up at the National Press Club in Canberra; last night he was at Ferguson’s desk in Ultimo.
Ah, to have the platforms and confidence of a billionaire tech bro.
Yet the argument being pushed by the tech companies that Australia’s stronger-than-most copyright laws should be amended has gained traction. Ahead of next week’s economic round table, the Productivity Commission has bought the argument that AI firms should be exempted from paying for the content they use to train their large language models.
But, an incredulous Ferguson asked: “How do you explain to Australian artists that an AI company using their material without recompense is not theft?”
The interests of AI companies should come first, argued Farquhar: “I think that the benefits of the large language models and so forth that we've got, outweigh those issues.”
Farquhar pointed out there are already exemptions to copyright, including coverage of news and satire. But he was unable to explain why allowing the same thing for AI would make the world a better place.
How would Farquhar have felt if, in the early days of Atlassian, all his work had been used without payment, Ferguson asked. Farquhar’s unconvincing answer: “If it had been transformative, yes... 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 think that is a fair use.”
The counter-argument - that AI companies paying for content would be good for productivity because it will create new markets and incentives to create more content - wasn’t addressed.
It’s bizarre that Farquhar was not better prepared for the encounter by his comms people. The questions were obvious. But I suspect that if you’re a tech billionaire, the people around you constantly tell you that you’re a genius. It’s probably been a while since he experienced anyone suggesting he might be wrong. Otherwise, why would he be mounting such a weak argument?
There is a particularly sinister philosophical debate known as Roko’s Basilisk. It argues that one day, when an AI superintelligence achieves self awareness, it will seek to punish those who could have foreseen its existence and failed to do everything they could to clear the path.
Farquhar may have been reduced to a puddle under Ferguson’s bright lights, but at least he has the comfort of knowing that when the Basilisk trials begin, he was the first to welcome our new robot overlords
Remade 2025 takes a view of the future of retail media
REmade curator Cat McGinn writes:
Remade 2025 has added two new sessions to its program, bringing perspectives on the future of retail media from global platforms, local innovators, and brand leaders.
The Trade Desk and Market Media (The Warehouse Group’s retail media arm) will reveal the thinking and ambition behind one of the region’s most innovative strategic retailer partnerships, and what it signals for the future of retail media.
The discussion will explore how Market Media has stepped beyond its own ecosystem, balancing customer closeness with privacy safeguards while supporting the local media market. The Trade Desk will bring a global perspective on similar partnerships in the US.
The session will offer insights into fuelling attention-led planning across streaming and audio, enabling retailer-verified measurement, and shifting budgets from walled gardens to the open internet. The panel will also discuss how they’re preparing for the tightening of privacy regulations.
In a newly announced session, curated by event partner Broadsign, a panel will examine the fast-evolving crossover between retail media and out-of-home (OOH) advertising. In-store screens are now a fixture in many leading retail media networks, blurring the lines between the two channels, but can they truly be considered OOH.
The panel will feature media owners operating at the intersection of both ecosystems, alongside brand and agency perspectives, and Broadsign, whose platform powers some of Australia’s leading retail media and OOH networks. Together they’ll explore the opportunities, challenges, and lessons each side can offer the other.
Other sessions on the day include a keynote from Amazon Ads ANZ’s Willie Pang on retail media 3.0, Epsilon’s Adam Skinner with a practical look at what works in the world’s most advanced retail media markets, and Zitcha’s Alberto Vergara with an exploration of what happens when AI becomes the customer.
A session with McCain Foods, Uber Advertising and PHD will unpack new research on how quick commerce is collapsing the path to purchase into mere seconds, and what that means for brands.
Also on the roster will be a joint case study from Logitech and Flywheel Digital, along with new research on creative effectiveness in retail media. Meanwhile, Commbank will share the inside story to its retail media network, Commbank Connect.
Remade: Retail Media Unmade will take place on September 23 at the Aerial Function Centre, Ultimo, bringing together leaders from across the retail, advertising, technology and media ecosystem.
Unmade Index dips
Tim Burrowes writes:
Ooh Media sank by 3.6% on the ASX today during a mixed day on the Unmade Index.
Other companies to fall included Nine (down 0.9%), IVE Group (down 1.2%) and Vinyl Group (down 2.1%).
Unmade Index stocks moving in the other direction included ARN Media, (up 2.2%) Enero (up 0.5%) and Pureprofile (up 5%).
The Unmade Index closed on 574.5 points, down six points for the day.
More from Mumbrella…
Opinion: Deep fakes are no longer fiction: The new frontline in protecting brand trust
Analytic Partners’ Paul Sinkinson on reality returning to marketing
New Zealand’s Dish magazine launches into Australian supermarkets
Time to leave you to your Wendesday. We’ll be back with an audio-led edition soon.
Have a great day.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade + Mumbrella
tim@unmade.media
The concept of expecting tech companies to act in the best interests of the public or of content owners is ridiculous. They have consistently proved willing to run roughshod over norms of business conduct, push local laws and lobby to the detriment of competitors.
Content owners can begin to take matters into their own hands to force negotiations with AI companies - NYT has done so through the courts, but cloud security provider CloudFlare has proposed a novel and ingenious way to help content owners recoup costs and get paid a reasonable fee for use of their content in AI training.
CloudFlare sits in front of many of the world's largest publishers, and can proactively block AI-crawlers from scraping websites when they are detected.
However, just blocking them is not enough of a disincentive - CloudFlare's novel approach is to trap unauthorised AI-scapers in a labyrinth of, ironically, its own AI-generated content slop, which would have the ultimate effect of filling the model data sources with large volumes of nonsense, and potentially reducing the value of model pre-training by introducing unreliable source data.
This has a very real cost to AI-companies if the billions they are investing in training is undermined by poor source data.
CloudFlare are proposing a gate-keeper style relationship on behalf of publishers that would allow paying partners into the sweet, sweet copyright material, and lock out freeloaders in a world of slop.
Seems only fair to me.
As is typically the case, I can see both sides of this.
On the fair dealing argument, how is it any different when a consultant googles nine gated content to put together a report that he sells to a client without compensating the owners of the intellectual property? Large language models are essentially doing the same thing, only they do it (for me at least) for a flat monthly fee instead of hiring somebody to be a researcher. I just prompt ChatGPT with a question like “What’s the lay of the land on fair dealing in Australia to the regulatory and legal environment for paying royalties to IP owners”. I could ask McKinsey the same question and they would use the same sources and in either case, as far as I know, the owners of the intellectual property wouldn’t get a dime out of it..
Conversely, if some of the wilder tech bro dystopian fantasies come to pass and we are all put out of work by AI, marketers are still going to need customers and customers are gonna need to have some way of raising money to buy stuff, so the idea of the AI firms paying people to compensate them for their intellectual property is one way to put some money in some people‘s pockets so that they can buy stuff, because otherwise, unless you can automate demand (which I don’t see how you can), the whole economy collapses in a global basis if these tech bros aren’t just raising the spectre of eliminating all work as a way to raise funding from gullible investors.