Meta and TikTok Join Google Against Indonesia's Copyright Rewrite
Indonesia's parliament heard from Meta, TikTok and Google this week, all arguing against a copyright rewrite that would make platforms pay publishers for news links and would write rules for artificial intelligence.
The bill would make Indonesia the first country in Southeast Asia to fold AI into its copyright law, arriving as governments everywhere try to decide whether training a model on human work needs permission or payment. Reuters first reported the draft earlier this year.
And the three companies attacked the payment plan from the same direction. Agung Pamungkas, who leads government affairs for Google in Indonesia, told lawmakers that charging platforms for showing links would limit what Indonesians can read.
Berni Moestafa, Meta's public policy head in the country, put the economics bluntly. He said publishers would lose readership traffic along with potential advertising and subscription revenue, and drew the line the industry draws everywhere else, that pointing a reader at an article is not the same as copying or republishing it.
TikTok came with a narrower argument about the AI provisions. Noudhy Valdryno, its head of public policy in Indonesia, said disclosure duties should not reach cases where AI only assists a person rather than generating the work, and asked lawmakers to keep safe harbour protections because platforms cannot reliably establish who owns a right or who licensed it.
But the reasoning behind the bill follows licensing rules already tested in Australia and Canada, where publishers argued that the link economy handed the value of their reporting to platforms that paid nothing for it, and that a bargaining right was the correction rather than a tax.
The hearing was a consultation step rather than a vote, and it produced no commitments from the three companies about what they would do if the law passes as drafted.
What Indonesia writes will matter beyond its borders, because a rule requiring payment for links would give the region's other governments a template, and because the AI disclosure clauses are being watched by platforms that would rather see the obligation fall on whoever generated the content.
So the fight is not really about whether AI belongs in a copyright statute, which everyone now accepts, but about who pays for the link, and the platforms are arguing that protecting publishers' revenue would cost readers their news.
Meta, TikTok and Google all appeared at an Indonesian parliamentary hearing on Wednesday
The bill would require platforms to pay publishers for news links and would set rules for AI
Indonesia would be the first country in Southeast Asia to put AI in its copyright law
Google and Meta say payment would cut news access and publisher traffic
TikTok wants disclosure duties limited to generative use and safe harbour kept
Source: Reuters
