KOMCA pulled its AI music registration rules 22 days after they took effect

The Korea Music Copyright Association voted on August 25 to withdraw the AI music registration rules it started applying on August 3. Its board resolved at the 8th meeting of the year to pull the amendments to both the regulations on reporting and registering musical works and the music copyright trust contract terms, Star Today reported.

KOMCA is the collecting society for the world’s seventh-largest music market, the Korean equivalent of ASCAP or BMI. Its rules decide whether a song can collect royalties at all. Three weeks ago it became the first body in Korea to open registration to AI-assisted music. Now the rule is gone and the question goes to parliament.

Why Korea’s culture ministry letter stopped KOMCA’s AI registration rules

The withdrawn standard let a creator register the human-authored part of a song when a person had played a substantive and leading role in writing, composing or arranging it. Prompt-only outputs, called “click tracks” in the Korean press, stayed out. KOMCA built the rule on overseas policy trends, findings from the national audit board, member requests, and roughly 3 years of work by its internal AI committee.

Lawmakers read the sequencing differently. Rep. Kim Jae-won of the Rebuilding Korea Party cancelled a joint policy seminar and held a press conference on August 10, arguing no legislature, ministry or social consensus had yet settled how much AI output counts as a work, so a trust body should not decide it first. The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism followed with a formal letter on August 18 recommending consultation across the whole arts sector.

What KOMCA’s withdrawal changes for anyone registering AI-assisted music in Korea

Registration of AI-assisted work is off the table again while the legislative process runs. The floor KOMCA set stays where it was: a song generated 100% by AI, with no substantive human creative contribution, is not registrable, and KOMCA says screening, monitoring, investigation and follow-up action continue under existing law.

One detail from the 22-day run is worth keeping. KOMCA says the announcement itself triggered voluntary declarations of fully AI works, corrections of rights ownership, and voluntary returns of royalties already collected on AI output. A rule nobody enforced yet still moved money back.

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The rule amendment is withdrawn, but setting standards for AI-assisted works is a task that can no longer be postponed.

Korea and Australia moved in opposite directions in the same 24 hours. ARIA wrote its AI line into an enforceable chart code on August 25. KOMCA took its line back out of the rulebook on the same day, and for the same underlying reason: neither country’s law says where the line sits.