On September 10, 2026, Indonesia's House Legislative Body (Baleg) agreed to spend the rest of the 2026-2027 session on the Copyright Law amendment bill. The same day, Deputy Communications and Digital Minister Nezar Patria said the government wants a clearer framework for AI in journalism. If enacted, the draft would be the first copyright law in Southeast Asia to address AI directly. It deserves a serious hearing, and it also contains one mechanism that should be dropped.
The strongest case for the bill
The case for the bill is better than its critics admit. Indonesia's current Copyright Law, Law No. 28 of 2014, was written before generative AI existed. It defines a creator (pencipta) as a person or persons who produce a work, and it defines a collective management body as a non-profit legal entity authorised by creators to collect and distribute royalties. Nothing in it says what happens when a model ingests a newsroom's archive.
Press groups say the gap is costly. Mustafa Layong of the legal aid group LBH Pers told the Jakarta Post that information is not obtained by journalists for free, and that platforms and AI systems crawl journalistic content without compensation or permission. The Press Law and Broadcasting Law regulate journalism as a profession, but they do not explicitly treat news content as copyrightable property. The draft would close that gap by classifying journalistic works as copyrighted creations for the first time.
A smaller point also favours the bill. Disclosure of AI use is a light obligation. It costs a platform a label and gives readers information, and it does not restrict anyone's speech.
What the draft does
As reported by Music Business Worldwide, the draft:
- bars using AI to imitate a creator's "distinctive style";
- requires disclosure when AI generated content;
- withholds protection from machine-only creations, while works with human involvement qualify;
- subjects copyrighted material used for AI training to fair-use limits or licensing; and
- routes compensation for aggregated, republished or link-previewed news through Indonesia's collective management body, the LMKN.
The same report says platforms that do not comply could lose their local business permits. Hermansyah Siregar of the Directorate General of Intellectual Property confirmed the draft is authentic and warned that unregulated generative AI "could kill human creation."
The bill would sit on top of Presidential Regulation 32/2024 on publisher rights. President Joko Widodo signed that regulation on February 19, 2024 and announced it on February 20. It was aimed at fairer cooperation between press companies and digital platforms. Its text does not mention artificial intelligence, according to a Mondaq legal overview, which also says it took effect on August 20, 2024. The regulation covers distribution priority and cooperation through licensing, profit-sharing or data-sharing. It never contemplated training data. The Patria framework is therefore filling a real hole.
Where the design goes wrong
The three AI provisions deserve different treatment.
Training licences are defensible. Paying for the right to ingest high-quality, professionally produced text is a market transaction, and licensing deals between AI developers and publishers already exist in other countries. A statute that clarifies when licensing is required can reduce litigation risk for everyone. The condition is that the rules are narrow, the rates are negotiated and disputes go to a neutral body.
Style imitation bans are the riskiest drafting. Copyright has always protected expression and not style. A prohibition on imitating a "distinctive style" has no clear boundary. It would reach parody, pastiche, homage and ordinary learning from influences, which are the ways human creators have always worked. A narrower rule against passing off AI output as a named creator's work would address the real harm without chilling expression.
Link-preview payments are the clearest mistake. Linking directs readers to the publisher's own site, which is the traffic publishers want. Charging for it through a state-supervised collective turns a referral into a tax. US courts have drawn the opposite line. On September 16, 2026, the Fifth Circuit held in Emmerich Newspapers v. Particle Media that a website linking to content does not transmit it, in the court's words "a website cannot transmit a work that it does not have," as EFF reported. That is American law and does not bind Jakarta. But it shows how far a link-preview levy departs from a widely shared understanding of how the web works.
The risk to the open web
Google's objection is self-interested, but part of it is correct. The company warned that "rigid, overbroad mandates" would harm local creators, slow innovation and leave Indonesia an international outlier. The most severe feature, revocation of business permits, makes the bill a lever on market access as well as a copyright rule. Platforms facing that risk may simply stop showing Indonesian news snippets. That would cut referral traffic to the very publishers the bill is meant to help.
The 2014 law is also twelve years old, so the opportunity to modernise it is real. The sensible course is to split the package.
- Enact the AI-disclosure duty and a clear training-licence principle.
- Define collective management oversight with transparent tariffs, published distribution rules and an appeals route.
- Remove link previews from the mandatory-payment scope, or limit payment to snippets that substitute for reading the article.
- Replace the style ban with a rule against deceptive attribution.
- Replace permit revocation with graduated, court-reviewable penalties.
Indonesia can lead Southeast Asia on AI and copyright. It will lead well only if the first regional model protects journalism without taxing the links that carry readers to it.