Colombia Regulates Cultural Sector Employment and PI and AI Rights

By Castillo Grau Abogados

On June 26, 2026, the President of the Republic of Colombia promulgated Decree 658 of 2026, officially adding Section 8 to Chapter 6 of Title 1, Part 2, Book 2 of Decree 1072 of 2015, the Single Regulatory Decree of the Labor Sector (Decreto Único Reglamentario del Sector Trabajo).

The administrative decree establishes a binding legal framework governing employment contracts, working conditions, and rights for workers across all artistic and cultural disciplines. The statutory preamble grounds the regulation in fundamental constitutional guarantees—specifically Articles 2, 25, 26, and 53 of the Colombian Constitution—and international treaties incorporated into domestic law.

Decree 658 covers all subordinate employment relationships in the cultural and creative ecosystem, encompassing researchers, performers, technicians, managers, and support personnel engaged across preproduction, rehearsal, performance, distribution, and postproduction stages. The decree dictates that all dependent artistic labor engagements must be formalized through clear, written contracts specifying the identity of the parties, job scope, duration, working schedules, wage rates, payment frequencies, and performance locations.

To address structural informality, the statute establishes that whenever a written contract fails to explicitly define its duration, the relationship is legally presumed to be an indefinite-term employment contract (contrato a término indefinido), carrying full employer payroll and social security contribution obligations.

While short-term and daily contracts remain permissible to accommodate creative production cycles, they cannot restrict statutory labor rights or health and safety protections. Additionally, the decree clarifies that voluntary associations or artistic collectives cannot be used to disguise employment relationships when subordination and personal service are present, enforcing the principle of the primacy of reality over formal contractual terms.

In response to technological developments in digital media, Decree 658 establishes landmark regulatory protections regarding intellectual property, personal attributes, and generative artificial intelligence. The text strictly regulates the usage, replication, and synthesis of a worker's physical or digital likeness. Employers are required to obtain prior, express, specific, and written authorization before capturing, recreating, cloning, synthesizing, or deploying a worker's image, face, voice, body, gestures, or expressions using generative artificial intelligence or digital cloning technologies. This authorization cannot be executed via advance blanket waivers or automatic assignments upon signing an employment agreement, and must explicitly define the technical purpose, media channels, geographic scope, duration, and independent financial compensation separate from regular wages. 

The decree establishes operational parameters for incorporating artificial intelligence within creative workflows while protecting human creative freedom and employment stability. Employers may provide AI tools to support technical, organizational, or creative tasks, provided these systems do not result in unilateral job reclassifications, pre-determined creative constraints, or unjustified terminations. When an employer mandates workforce training in artificial intelligence applications, such training must occur during paid working hours without generating financial costs for the employee.