The Philippines-Korea Copyright Forum 2026 put metadata at the centre of the AI music payment problem

Officials from the Philippines and South Korea spent a day on AI music copyright and came out pointing at the same thing: the rights data. The 2026 Philippines-Korea Copyright Forum ran in Bonifacio Global City on August 11, 2026, organised by the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines with South Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korea Copyright Protection Agency, Newsbytes.PH reported.

That number is already behind. Deezer’s own reporting has since put AI past 50% of its daily uploads, and SubmitHub found 23.2% of a million July releases were fully AI-generated. The direction is settled. What the forum argued about is what happens to the money once that volume arrives.

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Digital rights management is no longer just an administrative necessity, but the foundation for trust, accountability, and innovation.

Where AI uploads break the royalty chain

Ace Acosta, general manager of Philippines Recorded Music Rights, laid out the damage in three parts: royalty hijacking and fraud, manipulation of search algorithms, and revenue pools drained away from human creators. The pro-rata pool every legitimate artist is paid from is the same pool the spam is dipping into.

The mechanism underneath is duller than fraud and does more damage. Mass-produced uploads arrive carrying rights information that’s wrong, missing, or in conflict with catalogue entries already in the system. A platform that can’t match a recording to a verified owner can’t settle the performance rights or the royalty claim attached to it. The money doesn’t get stolen. It sits.

Lawyer Oliver Xavier Reyes of Disini Buted Disini Law Offices walked the room through the Philippine position on fair use, data scraping and human authorship, plus the takedown machinery and the protections platforms get. On the Korean side, the revised 2026 Copyright Act now lets the culture ministry order a site blocked before a committee deliberates, when the infringement is clear and nothing else will stop the harm in time. KCOPA says it’s built for overseas piracy sites that keep changing shape to stay ahead of enforcement.

What South Korea built that other markets have not

Korea’s contribution to the forum was infrastructure rather than argument. It stood up a national music rights database by 2020, then built a platform that collects usage information across services and feeds it back in. The stated purpose is transparent payment, royalty distribution someone can verify, and policy written off real numbers.

Korean music bodies have kept moving since. Six of them, KOMCA included, formed an AI coalition with a blockchain royalty plan, and KOMCA opened copyright registration to AI-assisted work while asking creators for their prompt logs. Whatever you make of the blockchain part, the country is treating identification as the job.