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Simpson Cheung

Hong Kong authorities will delay a proposed legal amendment to protect copyrighted works from being used to train artificial intelligence (AI) models and will issue operational guidelines first, the South China Morning Post has learned.
The Copyright (Amendment) Bill 2025, which aimed to introduce an “opt-out” mechanism for text and data mining to support AI technology development, was originally scheduled to be submitted to the Legislative Council in the first half of last year. The item was removed from Legco’s legislative agenda last August.
The legislative proposal, which was mentioned in last year’s policy address, did not appear in the 2026 blueprint or the city’s first five-year plan, delivered together earlier this month.
The “opt-out” mechanism had raised concerns after it was proposed in 2024, with critics saying it would “involve a lot of effort” for copyright holders to approach AI companies to check whether their work had been used for AI-generated content. They counter-proposed an “opt-in” mechanism.
Lawmaker Johnny Ng Kit-chong, chairman of Legco’s panel on commerce, industry, innovation and technology, said that according to his understanding, the government had postponed the legal amendment and would first draft an operational guideline on its proposed “opt-out” mechanism.
“If the copyright industry wants to pursue royalty recovery, you must present a complete operational solution showing how it can be executed,” he said. “If you lack such a solution, the industry will be sceptical.”
He said the copyright industry wanted to understand the details of how the “opt-out” mechanism would be executed.
“I think it is also fair to the IT sector,” he added.

Ng said there was nothing wrong with the opt-out concept, but clarification would be needed on how to execute it, for example, whether a media outlet needed to exclude every article it published from being used for AI training.
When contacted, the Commerce and Economic Development Bureau referred the SCMP to remarks made by its secretary on September 18.
Secretary for Commerce and Economic Development Algernon Yau Ying-wah responded to the SCMP’s questions during a policy address press conference and said the government had received “different views and ideas” after a two-month consultation in 2024.
“So I believe we have to consider all the concerns and come up with a better solution at this moment to make some changes or recommendations or guidelines for this copyright [ordinance],” Yau said.
Ng said he supported the government’s decision to be more prudent and monitor the developments in other jurisdictions after listening to public views. He added that the government told him there was no timetable for drafting the guidelines.
The original amendment bill, which included a “text and data mining exception”, would allow for the “reasonable use” of copyrighted works for computational data and analysis processing used in training AI models.
Among the five safeguards the government has proposed is an “opt-out” option, allowing copyright holders to expressly reserve their rights for content made public online from being used to train AI.
Other protections include requiring AI users to have lawful access to copyrighted works and to maintain and disclose records of the sources of that content.
Lawmaker Kenneth Fok Kai-kong, deputy chairman of the panel, said the legislative pause was a deliberate and prudent approach driven primarily by a lack of clear consensus both locally and internationally on how copyright law should intersect with AI.
He said the creative industries had expressed deep concerns that decades of hard work could be freely ingested by AI training models without authorisation or compensation, potentially undermining the entire creative ecosystem.
“It would be premature for Hong Kong to pioneer rigid statutory changes that might risk misaligning with global practices or imposing inflexible constraints on a rapidly evolving technology,” he said.
Fok said a balanced, future-proof approach should focus on market-driven cooperation, supplemented by market-led licensing schemes, non-statutory guidelines and continuous benchmarking with global trends.
Sharon Wong Yin-yue, executive director of the Hong Kong Reprographic Rights Licensing Society, said she attended a government briefing recently and was told the legislative amendment would not be tabled for discussion in Legco. Instead, the government would issue guidelines on using AI to different stakeholders, but she did not have the details.
She said the industry was discussing how to safeguard creative rights amid the rapid development of AI, rather than focusing on the opt-out mechanism.
She added that the society would introduce AI-related clauses to its licensing scheme and enhance public education on AI literacy.
Joshua Chu, a lawyer and co-chair of the Hong Kong Web3 Association, said he believed the government needed to catch up with the fast-changing development of AI over the past year, especially with the recent incidents of agentic AI going rogue and launching cyberattacks without human intervention.
He said, for example, the government needed to clarify the legal liability of AI agents if they had infringed on others’ copyright without being instructed by a human.
Francis Fong Po-kiu, honorary president of the Hong Kong Information Technology Federation, said it would be difficult to resolve copyright issues related to AI as they would involve multiple jurisdictions and it was hard to trace the original copyright owner after content was processed by the technology.
Fong suggested that copyright owners explore the possibilities of using encrypted watermarks that could be read by AI to protect their content.
The government should also strike a balance between AI development and the protection of copyright owners, he said.


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Government puts legal amendment on hold to draft guidelines balancing creative rights with tech development


Government puts legal amendment on hold to draft guidelines balancing creative rights with tech development.


Hong Kong delays AI copyright law to focus on guidelines first

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Government puts legal amendment on hold to draft guidelines balancing creative rights with tech development

Government puts legal amendment on hold to draft guidelines balancing creative rights with tech development