Indonesia's Directorate General of Intellectual Property (DJKI) at the Ministry of Law hosted the Global Dialogue on Cross-Border Copyright Royalty Governance in the Digital Era in Bali, framed as a voluntary and non-normative international discussion with three streams: transparency in royalty administration, accountability in governance systems, and interoperability of rights and metadata. According to a summary published on 9 October, Director General Hermansyah Siregar said the greatest challenge in cross-border royalties lies not in differences in substantive rights but in incomplete or conflicting data. Participants noted that rights holders have limited access to information on the use of works, deductions and how royalties are calculated, and that inaccurate metadata, misused identification codes, missing contracts and disconnected systems can break the chain from creation to payment, so that holding rights does not always mean receiving royalties.
The formal agenda for 8 October listed algorithmic accountability in digital remuneration as a separate item, alongside unallocated and unclaimed royalties, so-called black-box royalties and accountability across the digital value chain, which goes to how much transparency global digital platforms should provide when they use algorithms to calculate and distribute creators' income.
Indonesia argues that royalty governance should not rely solely on contractual relationships between industry players and proposes global parameters as a common reference point for determining royalty value trends, a proposal it plans to pursue at WIPO's Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR), whose next session is expected in late November or early December.
A WIPO representative presented WIPO Connect as infrastructure to improve data exchange between collective management organisations; it is free for developing countries, although servers and cloud capacity must be provided by the countries or organisations themselves. These proposals are an agenda put forward by Indonesia, not international rules.
J&C notes that for rights holders distributing music, video and other works on foreign digital platforms, whether royalties arrive depends largely on data quality: they should check that the international standard identifiers, owner details and contract records for each work are complete and consistent, register and update them promptly with collective management organisations and distributors, and watch the deductions and calculation methods shown in platform statements.
Source: globalroyalty.dgip.go.id | globalroyalty.dgip.go.id | www.thejakartapost.com
