AI-Composed Songs Surge... Government Standards for Royalty Distribution Still Absent

Korea Music Copyright Association Withdraws Internal Guidelines After 22 Days
Government Only Outlines Principle of Protecting Human Creativity
No Standards for Assessing AI Contribution or Distributing Royalties
Organizations in the US, Ja

Image to aid understanding of the article. Eumsillyeon

Music created with artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly proliferating, but the industry lacks clear standards for distributing copyright royalties, leading to increasing confusion in the market. There is growing controversy over how to judge the degree of creative contribution by humans in AI-human co-authored works, and whether to pay the full copyright royalties or only a partial amount to the human creators.

According to the music industry as of September 7, the Korea Music Copyright Association (KOMCA) withdrew its "Trust Management Criteria for AI-Generated Music" on August 25, just 22 days after its implementation. As a result, reviews and registrations of new music works partially created with AI have been put on hold again.

On August 3, KOMCA introduced regulations allowing trust registration only for parts of works where humans had made substantial and leading contributions to the processes of songwriting, composing, or arranging, even if AI was used. Music entirely generated by generative AI services, such as Suno, with only a prompt entered by humans, was excluded from management.

However, after the National Assembly pointed out that social debate should take precedence, and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism also recommended broad-based discussion in the cultural and arts sectors on August 18, KOMCA retracted the regulations. For AI-assisted works already registered for trust, cancellation procedures are underway. Songs awaiting review will remain on hold until new criteria are established.

This is not to say that there are no principles established at the government level. The current Copyright Act defines a copyrighted work as a "creative work expressing human thoughts or emotions." The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korea Copyright Commission have also clarified, since 2023, that AI-generated content without human creative involvement is not eligible for copyright registration. In June of last year, they published a "Copyright Registration Guide for Works Created Using Generative AI," detailing registration procedures and examples.

The issue is that the government’s legal copyright registration system and KOMCA’s trust management operate in separate domains. While the government has set the principle of protecting only the human-generated portion of a work, it has not determined how royalties for works co-created by AI and humans should be allocated among rightsholders.

At present, KOMCA’s “Regulations for Distribution of Music Copyright Royalties” only specify criteria for composers, lyricists, and arrangers, with no articles for separately calculating AI contributions. The system can sanction false claims of human authorship for fully AI-generated works, but it lacks benchmarks for how much human contribution in jointly created music should be recognized.

For example, in a song where AI generates the melody and accompaniment and a human makes partial modifications, with royalties amounting to 100 won, there is no clear basis for determining how much should be paid to the human creator. The key contention is whether the entire 100 won should be given when there is creative input from the human, or only the amount proportional to the human’s contribution.

Critics say the government is lagging behind industry realities in establishing systems. The recommendation for a review by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism came more than two weeks after KOMCA’s own standards were put into effect. The Ministry and the Korea Copyright Commission held the “2026 Copyright Issues Grand Debate” on August 27–28 to discuss “The Role of Copyright Systems in the AI Era,” but it is expected to take more time before concrete criteria are established for collecting and distributing music royalties.

Major copyright collective management organizations abroad have established and applied their own operating standards. Since last year, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI), and the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) have accepted “partially AI-generated music works,” in which human and AI creative elements are mixed, as works under management.

However, there are differences in how royalties are distributed. BMI pays full royalties for the entire work if the human contributions meet creativity standards, even if human involvement is as little as 10 percent. If the human input is recognized as creative, they can receive the whole amount.

The Netherlands’ BumaStemra and Norway’s TONO recognize rights only for portions created by humans if the areas of work can be clearly separated. For example, if AI writes the lyrics and a human composes the music, only the royalties corresponding to the composition are allocated to the human creator.

The Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) also manages only music where the human contributed creatively. If either the lyrics or the composition is entirely created by AI, that section is labeled as a “non-work (autonomously generated by AI).” If only the human-composed part of a work, in which AI wrote the lyrics and the human composed the music, is used, a 100 percent management rate is applied to the composition. When both lyrics and melody are used, JASRAC only manages the human-created share, at 50 percent.

The greater challenge arises when human and AI contributions are intricately mixed. While it may be possible to distinguish roles when a human writes the melody and AI writes the lyrics, it becomes much harder to split the contributions numerically when a human rearranges an AI-generated melody or completes a song based on AI outputs. There is still no objective standard for such assessment.

The industry is increasingly calling for more concrete criteria on everything from evaluating the human creative contribution, to standards for trust registration and royalty distribution.

Lee Siha, President of KOMCA, stated, “The purpose of the previous rule revision was to protect the rights and fair compensation system for human creators in the absence of clear standards,” adding, “It is no longer possible to postpone establishing standards for works created with AI.”

Choi Seungjae, Professor of Law at Sejong University, said, “We must shift from results-based assessment to a ‘process-centered’ or ‘contribution-based’ evaluation that reflects the creative process and human contribution.” Park Sungho, Professor Emeritus at the Hanyang University School of Law, also emphasized at a recent copyright forum, “As artificial intelligence takes a greater role in the creative process, it is urgent to solidify a ‘human-centered copyright system’ and to establish sophisticated legal standards to support it.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.