Indonesia’s Copyright Rewrite Puts AI Licensing and Music Royalties in Focus
Indonesia has paired two related but legally distinct copyright moves: lawmakers have completed a draft rewrite of the country’s 2014 copyright law, while registration for songs and musical compositions became free on August 1, 2026.
The draft remains under government consideration and is not law. The South China Morning Post reported that parliamentary deliberations were continuing during the recess through August 13. The registration change, by contrast, is in force under Government Regulation No. 30 of 2026, which was issued on July 2 and covers the Ministry of Law’s non-tax revenue.
What the draft would change for AI-assisted work
Reuters reporting reviewed by the South China Morning Post says the proposed bill would recognize copyright in AI-assisted works only when they meet a required level of human creative involvement. The draft does not define that threshold, leaving a central issue for lawmakers and any later implementing rules.
The proposal would exclude fully AI-generated works from copyright protection. It would also require disclosure of AI use in content and prohibit the use of AI to imitate a creator’s distinctive style.
Those provisions could affect musicians, filmmakers, publishers, software developers, game studios and visual artists. A creator who uses an AI tool may need to show how human decisions shaped the final work, while a work produced entirely by a system could receive different treatment. The practical result would depend on how the eventual law defines human contribution and how authorities enforce it.
Training data and platform obligations
The draft would address the use of copyrighted works to train AI systems through fair-use or licensing rules. The available reporting does not establish which licensing model would apply, how consent would be documented or how payments would be calculated.
The proposal could also require technology platforms to compensate publishers for aggregating, republishing or displaying link previews of news content, and for using journalism in AI training. Under the reported draft, payments would move through state-supervised collective-management organizations before being distributed to publishers.
These would be proposed obligations, not current Indonesian payment rules. Their scope, valuation and enforcement would still have to be settled if the bill advances. The outcome could matter beyond Indonesia because global platforms, publishers and rights holders operate across national markets, while local rules can influence licensing contracts and content-distribution practices.
Why free song registration matters
The separate fee waiver is intended to expand Indonesia’s national music-rights database, the Pusat Data Lagu dan/atau Musik, or PDLM. Music Business Worldwide reported that the fee for recording a song or musical composition fell from 200,000 rupiah to zero on August 1. Registration fees for other categories of creative work remain unchanged.
The Directorate General of Intellectual Property, or DJKI, has described the policy as a way to build a more complete database for rights identification and royalty administration. Specialist reporting attributed DJKI estimates that Indonesia has about 7 million songs and musical works, while only about 26,000 were logged in the PDLM at the time of the report. DJKI said that figure came from two of the country’s 17 collecting societies, with the others still to be brought into the system.
Registration does not create copyright protection where the underlying legal requirements are not met. Its administrative value is in documenting works and ownership information. DJKI has said that PDLM data is intended to support metadata matching and the calculation and distribution of royalties through Indonesia’s collective-management system.
That matters for recorded music and for film and television. Licensing a song for a soundtrack, performance or digital release depends on identifying the relevant writers, publishers and other rights holders. Incomplete data can delay payments or make it harder to route royalties correctly. A larger database may reduce those problems, but its effectiveness will depend on participation, data quality and collective-management practices.
What remains unresolved
Indonesia’s proposed rewrite brings AI use, training data, style imitation, platform accountability and creative rights into one legislative discussion. But the central rules remain unsettled. Lawmakers have not yet defined the level of human contribution, the boundaries of fair use, the licensing process, the details of disclosure or the enforcement system.
For Indonesian musicians and songwriters, the immediate practical change is that recording songs and musical compositions became free on August 1. For platforms, publishers and other creators, the larger question is whether the draft becomes law and whether any compensation duties ultimately cover news aggregation, previews, republication and AI training as reported.
Indonesia’s next step is legislative and regulatory rather than technological: whether the draft reaches enactment, and how lawmakers turn broad principles into rules that can be applied to music, film, journalism, publishing, software and other creative work.
Sources
- Reuters — Indonesia’s copyright rewrite puts Google, AI platforms on notice
- South China Morning Post — Indonesia’s AI copyright push opens new front in war over digital content
- Music Business Worldwide — Indonesia scraps song and music copyright registration fee
- Indonesia Directorate General of Intellectual Property — Government Regulation No. 30 of 2026
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