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TL;DR
Google, Meta and TikTok objected to parts of Indonesia’s proposed copyright-law revision at a parliamentary hearing on Nov. 11, 2026. The draft would address payments for news displayed by platforms and set rules for AI training, disclosure and creator rights, but its current text is unavailable and no vote date has been announced.
Google, Meta and TikTok challenged parts of Indonesia’s proposed copyright-law revision at a parliamentary hearing in Jakarta on Nov. 11, 2026, raising concerns about payments for news links and rules for AI training. The bill remains under debate in parliament’s Legislation Body, and the text currently being considered has not been made available in full.
The proposal would revise Law No. 28 of 2014, Indonesia’s copyright law. Parliament approved it as a legislative initiative on March 12, 2026, and the Legislation Body, known as Baleg, is considering it with the government. At the Nov. 11 hearing, lawmakers heard from Google, Meta, TikTok, the Press Council and Satu Lisensi Indonesia, according to Kompas.
The bill combines two contentious areas: platform use of news and copyright rules for artificial intelligence. A July draft reported by Reuters would require platforms to compensate publishers when they aggregate, republish or display news, including in link previews, and for some uses of news in AI training. It also proposed rules on whether AI may imitate a creator’s distinctive style, when AI use must be disclosed, and what qualifies as a copyright-protected work made with AI assistance. That draft is not final, and the provisions may have changed.
At the hearing, Google objected to payment obligations for indexing, aggregating and displaying news, and said mandatory licensing for AI training data would be unworkable at the scale of the web. The company proposed a text-and-data-mining exception with an opt-out mechanism such as robots.txt, according to reporting by Suara. Meta argued that sharing a link is not the same as republishing a news article and said payment duties could reduce publishers’ traffic and revenue. TikTok said disclosure rules should not cover cases where AI merely assists a person, and called for intermediary safe-harbor protections to remain, according to the supplied reports.
Indonesia’s AI copyright bill faces pushback
Google, Meta and TikTok challenged parts of the proposal at a Nov. 11 parliamentary hearing. The bill remains under debate, and its current text is unavailable.
What the proposal covers
The draft combines rules for news distribution with copyright rules for artificial intelligence.
Payments for displayed news
A July draft would require platforms to compensate publishers for some aggregation, republication and display, including link previews.
Licensing or exceptions
The draft considered licensing copyrighted works for training; Google proposed a text-and-data-mining exception with opt-outs.
Disclosure and human input
Proposed rules address AI disclosure, creator style and when AI-assisted work may receive copyright protection.
Where the platforms disagree
Their objections focus on how news links and AI use would be treated.
- Google challenged payment duties for indexing and displaying news, and mandatory AI-training licences.
- Meta said sharing a link is not republication and warned payment duties could reduce publisher traffic and revenue.
- TikTok opposed disclosure for cases where AI merely assists a person and called for intermediary safe harbors.
- The Press Council said platforms take 80 percent of digital advertising.
- It reported platform traffic to news sites had fallen by up to 70 percent.
- The council’s figures were presented at the hearing; periods and calculation methods were not specified.
The bill is still being shaped
The July draft is not necessarily the text now under consideration.
The revision was approved as a legislative initiative on March 12, 2026.
The Legislation Body and government continue deliberations; the full current text is unavailable.
No parliamentary vote date has been announced. The proposal is not law in force.
Publishers and Platforms Face New Rules
The disagreement affects how Indonesian news reaches audiences and how publishers might be paid when platforms display or use their work. A requirement covering link previews could change the economics of news aggregation. Google warned lawmakers that if a levy applied to links, it would have “no choice” but to stop crawling, indexing and distributing Indonesian news, Reuters reported. That is the company’s stated position, not an announced service change.
The AI provisions could also shape how developers train models on copyrighted material and how creators retain control over work and style. A licensing requirement could create a route for compensation, while an exception with opt-outs could give developers broader access to material. The final effect depends on wording that remains unsettled, including which uses are covered and how any licensing or payment system would operate.
At the hearing, the Press Council offered a contrasting account of the market. It told lawmakers that platforms take 80 percent of digital advertising and that traffic from platforms to news sites has fallen by up to 70 percent, according to the supplied reporting. Those figures were presented by the council; the materials do not specify the periods or calculation methods behind them. The debate therefore concerns both copyright and the bargaining position of publishers in digital distribution.
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A Revision Still Under Debate
The AI provisions first drew attention in a draft reported by Reuters on July 17, 2026. Hermansyah Siregar, a law ministry official overseeing intellectual property, confirmed the draft was authentic and said it would mark the first explicit recognition of AI in Indonesia’s copyright law. He also stressed that the text was not final. The version described in July proposed that AI-assisted works receive protection only when they meet human-involvement criteria, while fully AI-generated works would not qualify. It did not define how much human contribution would be enough.
That July version also proposed applying fair-use provisions or licensing agreements to copyrighted works used to train AI, and included possible sanctions for non-compliance, including revocation of local business permits. These details should not be treated as settled law: the draft has changed, reports refer to different versions, and the full text now before lawmakers was not available. At the Nov. 11 hearing, Google referred to draft Articles 29 and 30 on payments for indexing, aggregation, curation and news snippets, but the article numbers are provisional.
The proposal would add to an existing policy framework. Since 2024, Presidential Regulation No. 32 of 2024 has required digital platforms to support quality journalism. Press Council deputy chair Totok Suryanto told lawmakers that the regulation had not worked as intended and that platform compliance was low, according to Aktual. The proposed revision would address copyright duties directly, but its relationship to the existing regulation and how it would be enforced remain matters for the final law.
“A levy on links would leave Google with “no choice” but to stop crawling, indexing and distributing Indonesian news.”
— Google representative at the Nov. 11 hearing, as reported by Reuters
Key Draft Provisions Remain Unsettled
The full text under discussion at the Nov. 11 hearing was not available in the supplied reporting, and the July draft is not necessarily the version lawmakers are now considering. That leaves uncertainty about the exact scope of platform payments, which AI-training uses would require a licence, and whether the draft’s earlier proposed sanctions remain in the bill.
It is also unclear how the proposal would define meaningful human involvement in an AI-assisted work, how creators could establish that an AI system imitated a distinctive style, and what disclosure would be required. The sources describe company objections and press-sector concerns, but do not provide a final government response to each of them. No date for a parliamentary vote has been announced in the source material.
Lawmakers Continue Clause-by-Clause Review
Baleg and the government are continuing deliberations on the bill. The next substantive development will be a clearer account of the text that lawmakers intend to advance, including any changes made after the July draft and the concerns raised at the November hearing. No vote date is reported, so the proposal should be treated as a bill under discussion, not as a law already in force.
Readers should watch for publication of an updated draft, further hearings or official statements addressing link payments, collective licensing, AI-training exceptions and intermediary protections. Until those details emerge, the competing positions of platforms, publishers and policymakers describe the debate—not its outcome.
Key Questions
Has Indonesia passed the AI copyright bill?
No. It remains under deliberation by parliament’s Legislation Body and the government. The supplied reports give no date for a vote.
What did Google, Meta and TikTok object to?
Google challenged proposed payments for showing news links and mandatory AI-training licences, and sought safe-harbor protection. Meta argued that links are not republication and warned that payment duties could hurt publishers’ traffic and revenue. TikTok said disclosure rules should not cover AI used only as assistance and also supported safe-harbor protection.
What AI rules appeared in the reported draft?
The July draft reported by Reuters proposed rules on AI disclosure, imitation of a creator’s distinctive style, protection for AI-assisted works and the use of copyrighted material for training. The draft was not final, and its current provisions are uncertain.
Would platforms have to pay Indonesian news publishers?
The reported draft would require compensation for certain uses of news, including aggregation, republication and link previews. The exact scope and terms in the version now under consideration have not been confirmed.
Source: ThorstenMeyerAI.com
