Indonesia’s new Copyright Law, which is expected to come into force this month (October 2014) includes a claw-back provision that applies to assignments of literary and musical works.
Section 3 of the new law deals with economic rights, and within that section paragraph 3 deals with the assignment of economic rights. Article 17 confirms that an author has the right to assign all or part of his/her economic rights in a work. And then article 18 says that for literary and musical works, where the work is assigned without time limitation, copyright will revert to the author after 25 years.
At a DGIP seminar on 16 September 2014, the Director General of Intellectual Property Rights of the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, Ahmad M.Ramli, explained that the provision was designed to increase the value that authors get from the copyright law. Whether it has achieved this purpose or not is a moot point. As it reads, the law takes away an author’s right to assign away unlimited copyright in literary and musical works - authors may therefore receive less compensation for agreeing to the assignment.
The provision will be a serious concern from the perspective of assignees. Employers, ghost writers, and commissioned song writers should all be very concerned about what this means for them. The most practical solution could be to contract out of article 18 - specific agreement that the article 18 doesn't apply, or the work is assigned with the intention that it remain so for the full period for which copyright protection is available, or (e.g. death of author plus 70 years).
Assignees need to be ware of article 19 when receiving assignment of a literary or musical work that is ‘without limitation’.