Ideas Are Free, Credit Is Optional: Intellectual Property in Indonesia
Despite signing major IP treaties, Indonesia still struggles with respecting ideas and authorship. Here’s why the system favors copycats.
Indonesia is a land of Idea Appropriation. Not to be confused with "theft," which sounds far too aggressive. No, this is a gentler, more opportunistic art. Concepts aren't stolen. They're repurposed. Borrowed without asking. Celebrated as inspiration with no citation. IP is treated more like a public utility, open to anyone with a vague sense of ambition.
Legally, it all looks sound. Indonesia’s membership in global IP treaties is immaculate. Patent laws exist. Copyright laws exist. They even have provisions for communal IP and geographical indications, for when you need to legally prove that your knockoff comes from a specific village. But laws are one thing. The lived experience is another. Fire up Tokopedia or Shopee and it becomes clear: this is less a marketplace, more a rebranding factory.
Giving credit is not just uncommon. It’s almost suspicious. Why draw attention to the fact that someone else contributed, when pretending you did everything yourself is just so much simpler, and frankly, better for engagement metrics?
“We Have Laws, We Swear!” (And Other Fairy Tales We Tell the USTR)
If a law is passed in Indonesia and no one enforces it, does it make a sound? Only if the USTR hears about it. And even then, the response is mostly a shrug, and a new committee.
In theory, everything is there: patents, trademarks, copyright protections, industrial design laws, even a dash of traditional knowledge just to keep things postcolonially chic. The laws are signed, ratified, and revised. But step outside the ministry and into the real economy, and those neatly codified protections start to melt.
The U.S. keeps politely reminding Indonesia that its biggest online marketplaces remain hotbeds of piracy and counterfeiting. Each year, they’re placed on the Notorious Markets list, and each year, nothing really changes. You can still buy fake Balenciaga sneakers, pirated Adobe software, or your competitor’s product design under a new name, all within three clicks. Platforms respond with the same vague assurances: we’re working on it, we’ve launched new tools, our team is monitoring. No one asks how many tools actually work or what “monitoring” looks like.
Enforcement just isn’t a priority. IP infringement in Indonesia is ambient noise. Everyone hears it, everyone works around it. It's not apathy. It’s art. A kind of legal kabuki theatre where compliance is performed for international audiences while the actors onstage wink knowingly at the local crowd. The effect is so seamless, it should be copyrighted… though, naturally, no one would enforce that either.
Of Face, Power, and the Ancient Art of Taking Credit for Things You Didn’t Do
In Indonesia, credit isn’t free. It isn’t shared. It isn’t even earned. It’s claimed. Quietly, decisively, and almost always by someone who didn’t do the work. Credit functions as a status symbol. Like a designer handbag or a vanity license plate. It's meant to be displayed by the most visible person in the room, not the one who actually carried it up the stairs.
Startups operate as temples to founders, where the team’s labor is ritual and the founder’s face is the god. In agencies, ideas flow upward. A strategist’s insight becomes the managing director’s quote. A designer’s visual breakthrough becomes the company’s “house style.” Creative collaborators are politely erased during final delivery, with just enough ambiguity to ensure that if someone important asks who did the work, the answer is never “someone below me.”
This isn’t personal. It’s structural. Indonesia runs on hierarchy. From family life to corporate life, deference flows downward, and credit floats upward. Acknowledging a junior team member publicly might be seen as undermining leadership, or worse, admitting dependence. That’s not how power is supposed to look.
There’s also the discomfort with self-assertion. In a society shaped by collectivist values and historical trauma around political identity, saying “I made this” can trigger suspicion. Individual visibility is often interpreted as arrogance, or Western-style ego, which is treated as mildly distasteful at best and career-ending at worst.
So people keep quiet. Talent stays in the background. And the public-facing few continue to harvest the glow of achievements they didn’t create. All while telling themselves that it’s part of the team culture. That we’re all in it together. As long as no one asks whose name should have been on the damn slide.
“Your Idea? That’s Cute. I Made a Shopee Store From It.”
In the Indonesian business world, ideas are not possessions. They’re not intellectual property. They’re not even intellectual. They’re just... public goods. If you saw it and it wasn’t nailed down, well, you were meant to use it. That’s the spirit.
Pitching a concept is an act of generosity, not a business transaction. You thought you were meeting a client. Turns out, you were donating. Maybe you presented a campaign. Maybe a strategy. Maybe a new product concept. And maybe, just a few weeks later, you'll spot that same idea out in the wild. It’ll have a new name, new colors, and the credits will say: "Inspired by internal team discussions."
It’s not even malicious. It’s instinct. The person who monetizes it first is the rightful owner, and if you wanted to protect it, well, you should have filed a trademark, registered a patent, gotten a copyright, maybe hired a lawyer, and also accepted that none of that would’ve helped.
The only consistent legal response is silence. Most people don’t even consider it. The phrase “Yaudah lah” says it all. Let it go. Move on. It’s not worth the argument, and it definitely isn’t worth the reputation hit of being the one who made a fuss over "just an idea."
Meanwhile, the Shopee store launches. The campaign runs. The TikToks go viral. You sit there with your original deck and no invoice. And everyone applauds the entrepreneur who “had the vision.”
A Legacy of Socialism, Hierarchies, and the Worship of the Face
Indonesia didn’t arrive at its current IP and attribution mess by accident. It’s the product of a long, tangled history where collectivism was celebrated, individual recognition was suspect, and ambition needed to come with a humble face. Under Sukarno, the early post-independence state flirted with a kind of soft socialism. Not full-blown Marxism, but something more anti-colonial, nationalist, and deeply skeptical of personal ownership. Glory belonged to the people, not to individuals.
Then came Suharto, who overcorrected with military-backed capitalism and a purge of anything that smelled like intellectualism or dissent. Recognition and authorship weren’t just discouraged, they were dangerous. Safer to work quietly. Safer not to be seen.
Today, that legacy still lingers. There’s a cultural reflex to downplay contributions, to avoid drawing too much attention to oneself, to never outshine the person at the top. It’s more than humility. It’s survival instinct. Credit flows upward, not outward. Visibility is something you earn by navigating social structures, not by doing good work.
So we get the familiar cycle. Bosses take the spotlight. Creatives remain uncredited. Developers push code for products they’ll never publicly be linked to. Agencies win awards with anonymous work. And no one complains out loud, because doing so risks breaking the social fabric. You’d be seen as arrogant, difficult, or entitled.
The result is a kind of quiet erasure. Not malicious, just routine. Authorship becomes irrelevant. What matters is who presents it, who signs it, and who owns the client relationship. Behind the scenes, the real builders keep working, mostly unthanked, and usually unfed… at least in terms of recognition. Visibility is political. Attribution is optional. And history, it seems, has a long shadow.
Indonesia is bursting with talent. Creativity spills out of every corner. But when it comes to intellectual property, the approach often feels more like open season. Ideas are passed around, not protected. Attribution is optional. Execution is king, and the first to market wins, even if they didn’t come up with the idea in the first place.
The laws are in place. They tick all the right boxes. But without cultural buy-in or consistent enforcement, they serve more as window dressing than foundation. What emerges is a system where original thought is seen as a nice-to-have, not a necessary part of success. The actual originator is irrelevant if someone else can monetize the same thing faster, louder, or with better connections.
And if you push for credit? You’ll be met with detachment wrapped in philosophy. Maybe you’ll hear that ideas belong to everyone. Maybe you’ll get a shrug. Maybe you’ll get ghosted.
The incentive isn’t to innovate. It’s to imitate just well enough to win. Why build when you can copy, repackage, and take the photo for Forbes while someone else cleans the brushes?
At StratEx - Indonesia Business Advisory we help businesses read between the lines of Indonesia’s regulatory and cultural realities. Contact us if you're interested in localizing strategies for sustainable growth in Indonesia.