[2] When Indonesia became a sovereign nation on 27 December 1949,[4] it initially agreed to uphold the treaty as the successor state of the Dutch East Indies.
Because of the dispute, it also sought to distance itself from acts of the colonial government and did not want to be party to the treaty before the country had written its own copyright law.
[5] Support for copyright protection in the 1960s and 1970s was limited to lobby groups, such as the Indonesian Publishers Association (Ikatan Penerbit Indonesia).
Minister of Justice Ali Said, in defending the law, cited the social function of copyright and the need to limit its scope in the public interest.
It rejoined the Berne Convention in 1997 and was the first nation to ratify the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty that same year.
The law clarified the status of copyright and neighboring rights, which had been confusing in prior legislations, and prohibited parallel importation.
[11] It also imposed fines and prison terms for copyright violations, but lax enforcement resulted in the United States placing Indonesia on a priority watch list in 2007 for failing to protect intellectual property rights.
[7] A new copyright law was enacted in September 2014,[7] raising the protection period for the classical categories of works to the life of the author plus 70 years.