AI founder calls Australia’s expensive copyright regime ‘well structured’ for creators

Published in The Australian on September 8, 2026. Written by Jared Lynch

John Croll, co-founder of media monitoring start-up TrueScope, says Australia’s copyright regime is the most expensive in the world but unlike other artificial intelligence-focused players, he hasn’t lobbied the government for changes.

The reason is, while compensation for content is pricier than other countries, Mr Croll says it is “well structured” and hence doesn’t need an overhaul.

This is despite Tech Council of Australia chair and Atlassian billionaire Scott Farquhar calling for US-style fair use changes, and data and text mining exemptions, to allow AI companies to train their models locally – something it could unlock billions of dollars in foreign investment.

But copyright has become a flashpoint beyond Australia. Sony Group and Warner Music are suing Claude maker Anthropic in California over its alleged theft of copyrighted songs to train its models. Facebook owner Meta is facing similar allegations in New York after five publishers accused founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg of personally ordering the pirating of millions of books rather than paying for them.

Mr Croll – who spent years building iSentia into a media monitoring powerhouse before launching TrueScope – says content creators should be paid for their content.

“We’re a company that hasn’t come in and stolen anybody’s content. We do go off and get licensed first, and then come into market,” he said.

This was despite copyright being one of the biggest hurdles that delayed TrueScope’s Australian launch while Mr Croll quietly developed a customer base overseas.

“Wen we first got our product ready for market, copyright was in the federal court, in the copyright tribunal, and the media monitoring companies and the publishers were all discussing (it), so there wasn’t much around price certainty,” Mr Croll said.

“So we went off to other markets, built our product, got it really mature, and got hundreds of clients on the platform. I would say it’s still expensive to enter the Australian market on a copyright, but it’s well structured. Publishers have a very clear view of where they see value, and I’ve always believed the content creator should be rewarded for their efforts.

“The client needs to be able to pay for it, and the monitoring company needs to be able to stay in business. And if we can get those three elements right of the licensing, then it works well for everybody.”

Mr Croll said while he hasn’t pushed for copyright reform, he wanted competitive neutrality to allow new players like TrueScope to flourish and focuses on satisfying content creators, corporate clients and the media monitoring companies themselves.

“There’s bigger players looking for different outcomes at the moment. We just come from those three aspects that the creator should be rewarded because you know they’ve invested time and effort in it, but it should be balanced around us staying in business and the client being able to pay for it.”

To entice customers to his platform he is offering maximum contract terms of 12 months, accusing competitors of locking up clients in multi-year deals, which has stifled innovation.

“Two themes came back consistently: frustration with multi-year contract lock-ins, and with platforms customers felt had stopped innovating. Many said they were open to a new provider doing something different,” Mr Croll said.

TrueScope attracted customers in North America, Singapore and New Zealand before launching in Australia. Mr Croll said media monitoring has moved beyond a newspaper clipping service to an intelligence platform, offering clients insights such as real time consumer sentiment.

It features two primary agents: Truescope Assistant, which interrogates media coverage to answer ‘what happened’ and Truescope Analyst, which provides contextual meaning.

Mr Croll said every output is fully cited, allowing communicators to defend their data and insights when presenting to executive leadership.

“The media monitoring industry for 100 years talked about what happened but we’re looking at what’s next?

“We’re delivering real-time insights, and I think the industry started calling itself from media monitoring to media intelligence probably about five years ago – and I may have made that term up. But it is now media intelligence around AI and the data structures and the natural language processing that we do for every piece of content delivers actual real intelligence to the clients in real time, instead of that daily news report that just got sent out because that was the cycle of when the media clips were ready.”

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