Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing the music, content, and images we consume, raising questions about ownership, recognition, and income for content creators. In Malaysia, this creates a dual challenge: adopting AI as a driver of growth and innovation while ensuring creators are recognized and fairly rewarded.
The country already operates with a principles-based legal framework designed to adapt as technology evolves, including laws covering copyright, data protection, consumer protection, and platform governance.
Copyright and AI-Generated Works
One area where the law is coming under pressure is copyright. Malaysia’s framework is built around human authorship and originality, but AI-generated works are testing these definitions, creating uncertainty over ownership, attribution, and compensation.
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If an AI system helps produce a song, image, or article, questions arise over who owns the work, who should be credited, and whether existing copyrighted works can be used to train AI systems.
This uncertainty affects the creative economy, which contributed 6.8% of Malaysia’s gross domestic product (RM130.7 billion) in 2024 and employs over 760,000 people.
There is no global consensus on the best way forward, with different governments developing their own approaches while monitoring the technology’s evolution. The European Union allows rights holders to reserve their works from certain text and data mining uses for AI training, while Singapore’s Copyright Act provides exceptions for computational data analysis under specified conditions.
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Some approaches prioritize protecting rights holders, while others enable AI development. In Malaysia, the challenge is finding an approach that supports technological and economic advancement while recognizing and safeguarding creators’ rights.
Attempting to address this through a single, full framework risks overlooking important nuances. An overly rigid approach may limit flexibility as both the technology and its applications continue to develop.
This is where principles such as proportionality and technology neutrality become important. Regulating the risks AI creates rather than the technology itself and tailoring policy responses according to the level of risk can provide a more effective approach.
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