ChinaCopyright Law, Article 5(2) and Article 24(2)-(4) (facts exclusion and news-reporting exceptions)
Copyright Law, Art. 5(2), Art. 24(2)-(4) (2020 revision)
In force since .
A snippet reproduction rule binding public and private bodies.
- Instrument type
- an act of a legislature
What it requires
- You need not seek permission to use pure factual news reports (the news of the day); they are excluded from copyright protection outright.
- You may appropriately quote a published work in another work to introduce, comment on or explain it, without the copyright holder's consent or payment, if you credit the author and title and do not unreasonably prejudice the copyright holder.
- You may unavoidably reproduce or quote an already-published work when reporting news in a newspaper, periodical, radio or television broadcast, on the same conditions.
- If you are a newspaper, periodical, radio station or television station, you may reprint or broadcast another such outlet's already-published current-affairs article on political, economic or religious questions, unless the copyright holder has declared reprinting or broadcasting impermissible.
- Do not assume these exceptions reach a systematic news aggregator's reproduction of headlines and snippets: none is capped at a headline or extract length, and no reported Chinese court decision applies them to one.
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.
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
What this law does
Article 5(2) excludes 单纯事实消息 (unofficial rendering: "the news of the day", i.e. pure factual news reports) from copyright protection outright, so a bare news item is never a protected work under Chinese law whichever outlet reports it first.
Article 24 separately sets a closed list of uses that need neither the copyright holder's consent nor payment provided the author and title are credited and the use does not unreasonably prejudice the copyright holder: item (2) permits appropriately quoting a published work in another work to introduce, comment on, or explain it; item (3) permits unavoidably reproducing or quoting an already-published work when reporting news in a newspaper, periodical, radio, or television broadcast; and item (4) permits a newspaper, periodical, radio station, or television station to reprint or broadcast another such outlet's already-published current-affairs article on political, economic, or religious questions, unless the copyright holder has declared reprinting or broadcasting impermissible.
None of these exceptions is capped at a headline-length or short-extract threshold, and no reported Chinese court decision applies them to a systematic news aggregator's reproduction of headlines and snippets as opposed to conventional news reporting or quotation.
When LexLint raises it
When your app profile says your app reuses other publishers' content.
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