Indonesia drafts Southeast Asia's first AI copyright law, with a ban on style imitation

Indonesia is rewriting its copyright law around AI. A draft bill, confirmed to Reuters on July 17, 2026 by law ministry official Hermansyah Siregar, would make Indonesia the first country in Southeast Asia to write AI directly into its copyright framework. No timeline for passage exists yet.

What Indonesia’s draft copyright bill would change

The draft rests on four planks:

• Copyright protection for AI-assisted works, but only with human contribution. Fully AI-generated works get nothing.
• A ban on AI imitation of a creator’s distinct style.
• Mandatory disclosure of AI use in content.
• Required compensation from tech platforms for content used in AI training and aggregation, with strict penalties.

The human-involvement threshold is the open question. The draft does not yet define how much human contribution earns protection, as Digital Music News notes, and for musicians the line between an AI-assisted song and a generated one decides everything.

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The development of generative AI has disrupted the copyright framework. If unregulated, it could kill human creation.

Why a style imitation ban goes further than US and EU law

Style sits outside copyright almost everywhere. A producer can be cloned in sound, cadence, and arrangement without a single copied note triggering infringement, which is why artists fighting AI sound-alikes reach for voice and publicity rights instead. Indonesia’s draft would protect the style itself, a line no major music market has drawn.

The disclosure plank puts Indonesia ahead of the industry’s own voluntary efforts too. The RIAA-backed AI labelling proposal and Spotify’s Verified badge are opt-in systems. This would be law. And the platform-pays-for-training plank echoes the licensing structure GEMA has pushed in Europe, written as statute instead of settlement.