Cultural Sovereignty in the Age of AI: A Postcolonial Critique of Intellectual Property Frameworks for Indonesian Traditional Arts
This article employs a postcolonial critique to argue that Indonesia's current intellectual property frameworks, rooted in colonial-era individualism, fail to protect traditional cultural expressions from AI exploitation, and proposes a culturally sovereign regulatory model based on community licensing, benefit-sharing, and Free, Prior and Informed Consent to achieve epistemic justice.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
Imagine a library where the books are not just stories, but the living memories of entire cultures: the intricate patterns woven into cloth, the specific shapes of carved puppets, and the ancient melodies played on metal gongs. For centuries, these creations have been passed down through generations, belonging not to a single person but to the community that nurtured them. Today, a new kind of machine has arrived that can read these books, learn their patterns, and then write new stories that look and sound just like the originals. This machine is generative artificial intelligence. While it promises to create art and solve problems, it also raises a difficult question: if a machine learns from a community's ancient art to make something new, who owns that new creation? Does the community get a say, or does the machine simply take what it needs and move on? This is the central puzzle facing legal scholars in Indonesia, a nation with one of the world's richest collections of such traditional art.
A recent study by Muhammad Ilman Abidin from Universitas Islam Bandung examines this exact problem. The research focuses on how current laws in Indonesia fail to protect traditional arts like batik cloth designs, wayang puppet imagery, and gamelan music when they are used to train artificial intelligence. The author argues that the problem is not just a simple gap in the rules, but something much deeper. The current legal system was built on ideas from the colonial era that value individual creators and new, original inventions. These ideas do not fit well with traditional arts, which are often created by groups over long periods and are valued for how faithfully they preserve the past rather than how much they change it. Because the law cannot easily recognize a group as a single "author" or a traditional pattern as "original," these cultural treasures are often left unprotected, allowing companies to feed them into AI systems without permission or payment.
The study begins by looking at a real-world example where a commercial AI platform generated hundreds of designs that looked almost exactly like classic Javanese batik patterns. The company did not ask the Javanese communities for permission, did not credit them, and did not pay them anything. Under the current Indonesian laws, this was perfectly legal. The researcher explains that the main law protecting these arts, passed in 2014, gives the government the right to manage these cultural expressions. However, this approach treats the communities as passive subjects rather than active owners. The government acts as a middleman, but it does not have to ask the communities for their consent before allowing others to use their culture. Furthermore, a newer regulation from 2022, which was meant to improve protection, focuses on creating a database to list these arts. While this helps prove that an art form exists, it does not stop AI systems from downloading that list and using the images to train their models.
The core of the paper is a critique of why these laws fail. The author uses a perspective known as postcolonial theory to show that the legal system is built on a specific way of thinking that favors individual creators. In this system, a work is only protected if it was made by one person at a specific time and if it is new enough to be considered original. Traditional arts, however, are usually the result of many people working together over many years, improving a design slowly and carefully. Because they do not fit the "individual author" model, the law treats them as if they belong to no one, making them free for anyone to take. This is described as a form of "data colonialism," where the raw material of human culture is taken from the Global South to fuel the technology of the Global North, without the original creators receiving any benefit. The study suggests that this is not an accident but a structural flaw that continues the patterns of the past.
To fix this, the paper proposes a new set of rules based on the idea of "cultural sovereignty." This concept means that the communities who hold these traditions should have the power to decide how their culture is used. The author suggests three main changes. First, the right to license the use of these arts should belong to the community councils, not the government. Second, any company wanting to use these traditional designs to train an AI must get "free, prior, and informed consent." This means they must talk to the community, explain exactly what they plan to do, and get a clear yes before they proceed. Third, if the AI creates something valuable using these designs, a portion of the money made must go back to the community to help preserve their culture and support future generations. The proposal also calls for companies to be transparent about what data they used to train their AI, so communities can see if their art was included.
The study concludes that Indonesia is in a unique position to lead the world in solving this problem. Because the country has such a vast array of traditional arts and already has laws that recognize communal ownership, it can create a model that other nations might follow. The author argues that simply tweaking the existing laws is not enough; the entire way we think about who owns culture needs to change. By putting the communities in charge and ensuring they benefit from the use of their heritage, Indonesia could help create a fairer system for the age of artificial intelligence. This would ensure that the rich cultural history of the nation is not just a free resource for machines, but a living tradition that continues to thrive with the support of the people who created it.
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