Indonesia is drafting what would be Southeast Asia's first copyright law to explicitly address artificial intelligence, according to a July 17 Reuters review of the draft bill — a document whose authenticity was confirmed to the agency by a law ministry official overseeing intellectual property.
The tiered test
Rather than simply barring AI from authorship, the draft amending Copyright Law No. 28 of 2014 builds a sliding scale around human involvement. Works made using AI with sufficient human creative direction receive standard, full copyright. Works generated autonomously with minimal human input are not left naked either: they get a limited "related rights" protection, a weaker layer familiar from broadcast and performance law. What counts as "sufficient" involvement is left undefined — the gap critics flagged first.
Wider than AI
The same draft drags Indonesian copyright into the platform era wholesale, extending protected-work categories to e-books, blogs, digital art and NFTs, AR/VR works and blockchain-based assets. It would also establish a Royalty Endowment Fund — Dana Abadi Royalti — to manage collections for creators.
Why platforms are watching
Reuters framed the rewrite as putting Google and AI platforms on notice. Indonesia is the world's fourth-most-populous country and one of the largest markets for social platforms anywhere; a statutory definition of when AI-assisted content earns protection — and when it earns only related rights — would ripple through every generative tool operating there.
The path ahead
Parliament approved the initiative as a legislative priority in March 2026, and the bill is now in joint deliberation between the House of Representatives and the government. Reuters noted it is not yet clear when the bill would pass. If it does, Indonesia would leapfrog jurisdictions like the US — where the Copyright Office has held the human-authorship line case by case — with the region's first statutory answer.