Indonesia is preparing a copyright-law rewrite that would explicitly address generative AI, including disclosure duties and a proposed bar on using AI to imitate a creator’s distinctive style. A draft reviewed by Reuters reporting would also require technology platforms to compensate publishers for aggregating, republishing or previewing news, and for using that material to train AI systems.
The draft would recognise copyright in AI-assisted work where there is sufficient human involvement, while excluding fully AI-generated material. That is a meaningful legal line, but the bill does not yet define how much human contribution qualifies. Its authenticity was confirmed to Reuters by Hermansyah Siregar, an Indonesian law-ministry official overseeing intellectual property.
The proposal is not law, and its eventual wording, parliamentary timetable and enforcement machinery are unknown. Still, it is an unusually direct attempt to treat model training, output labelling and creator-style imitation as copyright questions in one framework.
Unique insight
Indonesia’s draft matters because it joins the content pipeline and the generated result in one regulatory chain, leaving AI platforms less room to treat training data as someone else’s problem.
Analysis
Publishers, artists and AI providers are all affected: rights holders gain a possible route to payment and attribution, while platforms would need clearer records of news use, training inputs and AI-assisted output. The immediate practical change is not compliance tomorrow but planning now, because product teams that sell into Indonesia may need disclosure controls and licensing processes that are difficult to bolt on later. In the months ahead, the decisive signal will be whether legislators preserve the compensation and style-imitation clauses; if they do, the bill could become a regional template for treating AI copyright as an operational obligation rather than a courtroom dispute.
Bottom line — If I only remember one thing tomorrow, what should it be?
Indonesia’s proposed law would force AI platforms to confront the economic and creative consequences of training and distribution in the same rulebook.
- Story type: Breaking news
- Impact: High
- Confidence: High (official announcement)
- Audience: Business
- What changed: Indonesia proposed AI-specific copyright provisions covering human involvement, disclosure, style imitation and platform compensation for news use and AI training.
- What to watch: Parliament’s treatment of the compensation, disclosure and distinctive-style provisions will show how far the final law reaches.
- Reading time: 2 minutes
