Bosnia and HerzegovinaLaw on Copyright and Related Rights, Content Limitations (No Text-and-Data-Mining Exception)
In force since .
A copyright and text and data mining (TDM) rule binding public and private bodies.
- Obligation class
- Licensing, TDM
- Audit expectation
- none
What it requires
- Do not reproduce, distribute, make available, or otherwise exploit a copyrighted work, including for training a model on it, without a transfer of the relevant right or a license, because the Law recognizes no general text-and-data-mining or fair-use exception beyond its closed list of specific limitations.
- Reproducing only subject matter the Law excludes outright, such as bare daily news, official legislative or judicial texts, or ideas and procedures, does not implicate copyright.
- Rely only on a listed specific exception, such as the quotation exception, to justify reproducing a copyrighted work without a license; a generic fair-use argument is not available.
These lines are LexLint's reading of the law's text.
In the frameworks
- NIST AI RMF
- MAP 4.1Approaches for mapping AI technology and legal risks of its components – including the use of third-party data or software – are in place, followed, and documented, as are risks of infringement of a third party’s intellectual property or other rights.
- NIST AI 600-1
- GAI-RISK-10Intellectual Property
- GAI-RISK-12Value Chain and Component Integration
- MIT mitigations Draft
- FINOS AIGF
- AIR-PREV-007Legal and Contractual Frameworks for AI Systems
- ETSI EN 304 223
- 5.2.4-2.1Minimum record for training data: its source, such as a page URL, and when it was collected.
Our reading of where this law's duties sit in each framework. It never says that running a control meets the law. How we read a framework against the law
Identifiers refer to ETSI EN 304 223 V2.1.1 (2025-12), © ETSI 2025, all rights reserved. ETSI owns the standard; no ETSI text (titles or sentences) is reproduced here. The standard is free to download from ETSI.
If you get it wrong
Criminal exposureNo
Private right of actionYes
Criminal exposure note
Unauthorized exploitation of a copyrighted work is a misdemeanor (prekrsaj) under art. 170, not a criminal offense (krivicno djelo), so no separate criminal-code prosecution attaches to this Law's own violations.
Penalty structure
Article 170(1) sets a misdemeanor fine of BAM 1,000 to BAM 200,000 for a legal entity and BAM 1,000 to BAM 20,000 for an entrepreneur who exploits a work, its performance, or its database without the required transfer of rights, among other listed acts. Article 170(2) fines the responsible natural person within that legal entity or entrepreneur BAM 3,000 to BAM 20,000 for the same conduct, and art. 170(3) fines a natural person acting alone BAM 3,000 to BAM 10,000.
- Rule
- Fixed only
- As of
- Minimum
- 1,000
- Currency
- BAM
- Fixed cap
- 200,000
Who enforces it
Enforcement body
Right holders, by court action (Articles 150 and 156); misdemeanor fines are set by Article 170; market inspectorates of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Republika Srpska and the Brčko District supervise trade in goods and services (Article 173).
Settledness
- As of
- Open questions
- Does Article 43, which permits a temporary reproduction only if it is "a transient or incidental act constituting an integral and essential part of a technological process" whose "sole purpose" is transmission or authorized use, cover the intermediate copies a crawler makes before it extracts content?
- Does the Article 40(1) condition that a limitation be "in conformity with good practices" and limited "by the intended purpose" bar use of a work to train a model, given that no limitation in Articles 41 to 54 names text-and-data-mining?
What it makes you log
Logging duty
Articles 40 to 54 set the closed list of substantive limitations to copyright (statutory licenses, free uses such as quotation, private copying and database use by an authorized user). None imposes a duty to create, keep, produce or review a log or record, and none is a text-and-data-mining exception. Article 54(2) requires recordings made when testing devices to be deleted without delay, which limits a copy of a work rather than a log. The cited articles carry no territorial clause.
- Kind
- None
- As of
What this law does
Article 40(1) states that content limitations of copyright are possible only in the cases provided for in the Law's own chapter on limitations, so the Law recognizes no residual fair-use or fair-dealing ground beyond that closed list.
The list, arts. 41 to 54, includes a statutory license for teaching materials and periodicals, free-use grounds such as private reproduction, quotation, and parody, and a database-specific limitation for an authorized user's normal use, but contains no exception naming text-and-data-mining, machine reading, or automated analysis; the Law predates the European Union's 2019 Digital Single Market Directive and its Articles 3 and 4 text-and-data-mining exceptions and has not been amended to add an equivalent.
Separately, art. 8(1) excludes ideas, procedures and methods, official legislative, administrative and judicial texts, political and courtroom speeches, daily news and brief press notices, and folk literary and artistic creations from copyright protection outright, so a scraper reproducing only that excluded subject matter does not implicate copyright at all.
When LexLint raises it
When your app profile says your app crawls the web or trains models.
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