From Identity to Monetization: Governing Digital Royalty Management through Digital Identity in Indonesia

Platform-economy royalty systems still rely on fragmented metadata, intermediary-controlled databases, and Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems designed mainly for access control and copyright enforcement. Inconsistent attribution, delayed payments, and limited interoperability therefore persist. This article proposes a Digital Royalty Management Model, a governance framework grounded in Digital Identity and digital trust infrastructures. Its architecture links Subject Identity, Digital Object Identity, Rights and Entitlements, Licensing and Authorization, Provenance and Usage, Royalty Entitlement and Allocation, and Payment and Remuneration. Legally, identity assurance can support verifiable coordination of rights-related relationships without substituting for substantive copyright law. Using a qualitative, normative, conceptual, comparative, and socio-technical approach, the article examines the United States, China, the European Union, and Indonesia. The United States illustrates sector-specific institutional centralization; China, state-recognized identity and provenance governance; the European Union, interoperable and legally recognized trust services; and Indonesia, a transition combining centralized royalty administration with emerging Digital Identity infrastructure. Indonesia is a critical test case: its One Gate Policy and Digital Identity and electronic-trust framework have developed simultaneously. The principal challenge is not whether royalty governance should be centralized or decentralized, but whether identity, content, rights, authorization, usage, and payment remain reliably connected across organizational and platform boundaries. Sustainable governance therefore requires aligning institutional authority with interoperable trust infrastructure while preserving the distinction between identity assurance and substantive rights determination. Unlike conventional DRM, which governs access, and blockchain-based systems, which automate transactions, the model treats Digital Identity as a cross-platform trust layer connecting subject, object, rights, authorization, usage, and remuneration.