South Korea’s largest music copyright collective has introduced a new rule requiring creators to guarantee that AI wasn’t used to write songs when registering those new songs with the organization.
“Currently, there are no clear legal standards or management plans for music utilizing AI, so the association is holding off on registration when AI-utilized music is reported,” the Korean Music Copyright Association (KOMCA) said in a statement posted to its website last month.
Effective March 24, those wishing to register a song with the collective management organization must tick checkboxes guaranteeing that AI wasn’t used in its creation.
If AI was used during the songwriting process but the registrant claims that it wasn’t and KOMCA finds out about it, the org may withhold royalty payments or delete the work from its system altogether.
“You must agree to confirm and guarantee that the work you are reporting did not utilize AI and was created solely through human creative contributions,” KOMCA stated.
Creators will also have to agree to “assume legal responsibility for all civil and criminal disputes arising from false reports,” and that if it’s found that AI was used in creating a song, “actions such as withholding payment or deleting copyrighted works may be taken in accordance with the association’s policy.”
The non-profit, creator-owned KOMCA serves 30,000 songwriter, composer, and music publisher members and administers a catalog of more than 3.7 million works, including those of notable Korean artists such as Psy, BTS, Super Junior, and EXO.
Notably, the CMO administers copyrighted songs and not recordings, so its policy doesn’t apply to recorded music. Some South Korean K-pop companies have employed AI in recordings; for instance, HYBE has released music with vocal lines translated into multiple languages by AI.
KOMCA has confirmed that its policy requires a “0%” contribution from AI in song creation, according to a report at the Korea Herald.
In outlining its policy, KOMCA noted that the policy may change in the future. The new policy is “a management measure” at a time when “legal standards for AI music have not been established.”
The association also noted that “due to recent advancements in AI technology, the amount of music output using AI is rapidly increasing.”
KOMCA’s policy is stricter than South Korea’s overall policy on use of AI in copyrighted works.
In 2023 the Korea Copyright Commission and the country’s Ministry of Culture, Sport and Tourism announced that, while fully AI-generated works can’t be copyrighted, in cases where AI contributed to the creation of a work, those parts of a work that were human-created may be copyrightable.
“Due to recent advancements in AI technology, the amount of music output using AI is rapidly increasing.”
Korean Music Copyright Association
KOMCA’s decision comes at a time when lawmakers and courts around the world are grappling with the issue of copyrighting AI-made works.
Recently, a US Court of Appeals upheld a lower federal court’s 2023 ruling that works made entirely with AI cannot be copyrighted.
Computer scientist Dr. Stephen Thaler, who created a generative AI technology called the Creativity Machine, had sought copyright registration with the US Copyright Office (USCO) for the artwork created by his AI. Thaler went to court after the Copyright Office denied his application based on its human authorship requirement.
“The Creativity Machine cannot be the recognized author of a copyrighted work because the Copyright Act of 1976 requires all eligible work to be authored in the first instance by a human being,” the appellate court ruled last month.
However, the USCO’s policy applies only to works made entirely by AI. In a recent report, the Copyright Office noted that works made with the assistance of AI can be copyrighted, so long as there is a “sufficient” amount of human expression in that work.
“The use of AI tools to assist rather than stand in for human creativity does not affect the availability of copyright protection for the output,” the USCO report stated.
“Where that creativity is expressed through the use of AI systems, it continues to enjoy protection. Extending protection to material whose expressive elements are determined by a machine, however, would undermine rather than further the constitutional goals of copyright,” said Shira Perlmutter, Register of Copyrights and Director of the USCO.Music Business Worldwide
