To protect the legal interests of Copyright holders, it can be done in two ways, namely civilly by requesting compensation which can be in the form of a request to surrender all or part of the income obtained from the results of Copyright infringement through a civil lawsuit to the Commercial Court (Article 99 Paragraph (1) of the Copyright Law) as well as criminally as determined in Article 113 Paragraph (2) of the Copyright Law with a maximum imprisonment of 3 (three) years and/or a maximum fine of Rp. 500 million or related to Intellectual Property Rights as regulated in Article 25 of the ITE Law.

In addition to litigation efforts that can be taken if a dispute arises between the conflicting parties, other solutions that can be taken are through alternative dispute resolution outside the court (alternative dispute resolution) such as consultation, negotiation, mediation or conciliation.

However, we are still pessimistic even though there is a legal umbrella that protects artists for their work, but in practice they still encounter obstacles and there is no common ground, either because of the lack of firmness of the legal substance, the low legal culture of the community or the structure of law enforcement that is still not effective in resolving disputes.

As an alternative to solving this problem, and thanks to technological developments that are in line with applicable legal rules, YouTube as one of the largest social media platforms and the largest contributor to the birth of “cover musicians” has a feature that can detect songs that have similar tones. And if a similarity is suspected, it automatically divides the income or royalties of the cover artist to the original singer. In fact, YouTube often takes firm action by blocking videos or content that is considered to violate Copyright.

Thus, we can learn together that the existence of fences of rules and ethics does not mean limiting content creators in expressing themselves, but is intended to create a healthy and fair creative ecosystem space that is a common agreement and desire.

*This article is the personal opinion of the author and does not represent the views of the Indonesian Legal Literacy editorial team.