EgyptLaw No. 82 of 2002 on the Protection of Intellectual Property Rights, Copyright and Database Chapter (Book Three)
Law No. 82 of 2002 Copyright and Database Chapter (Book Three), on the Protection of Intellectual Property Rights, as amended by Law No. 178 of 2020
In force since .
A database right rule binding public and private bodies.
- Obligation class
- Prohibition, Licensing
- Audit expectation
- none
What it requires
- Treat a database compiled through the selection or arrangement of its contents as copyright-protected: do not reproduce or copy all or a substantial part of a database, in whole or in part, without the rights holder's authorization, even after the database has been published.
- Rely only on the Law's enumerated exceptions rather than a general fair-use or text-and-data-mining defense: personal non-commercial use, quotation or analysis for criticism, discussion, or information, and narrow teaching, library, and legal-proceeding copying, each on its own conditions. There is no exception addressed to training an AI model on copyrighted content or a compiled database.
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
If you get it wrong
Criminal exposureYes
Private right of actionYes
Criminal exposure note
Art. 181: imprisonment of not less than one month, a fine of EGP 5,000 to 10,000, or either, for selling, renting or putting in circulation a protected work, or disseminating it through computer networks, without the author's prior written authorization; on repetition, imprisonment of not less than three months and a fine of EGP 10,000 to 50,000, and the sanctions are multiplied by the number of works infringed. A civil claimant may also seek conservatory measures (seizure, discontinuance of reproduction) from the court (Art. 179).
Penalty structure
Art. 181 sets a fine of EGP 5,000 to 10,000 on a first conviction, alone or with imprisonment of not less than one month; the ceiling of EGP 50,000 is the fine on repetition, when imprisonment of not less than three months is added. The text multiplies the sanctions by the number of infringed works, sound recordings, broadcast programs or performances, so the amount applies per infringed work. The civil remedies under Art. 179 are not reducible to a single monetary cap.
- Rule
- Per violation only
- As of
- Minimum
- 5,000
- Currency
- EGP
- Per violation unit
- Violation
- Per violation amount
- 50,000
Who enforces it
Enforcement body
Egyptian Economic Courts (Law No. 120 of 2008), and since 2023 the Egyptian Intellectual Property Authority (Law No. 163 of 2023)
Settledness
WIPO Lex states that the current text of this Law is unavailable in English and supplies the 2002 version for reference.
- As of
- Open questions
- Does automated extraction of records from a website's database amount to "Reproduction or copying of all or a substantial part of a database" under Article 171, and what makes a part "substantial"?
- Does Article 141, which says "Protection shall not cover mere ideas, procedures, systems, operational methods, concepts, principles, discoveries and data", leave the individual records of a database unprotected when only a part of the database is copied?
What it makes you log
Logging duty
Articles 140, 171 and 181 protect a database as a work, keep the reproduction of a database outside the personal-use exception, and punish infringement. They impose no duty to create, keep, produce or review a log or record, and they carry no territorial clause. Article 187, which requires an establishment that puts works in circulation to keep registers of each work and its circulation year, is a licensing rule for distributors that the row does not cite.
- Kind
- None
- As of
What this law does
Book Three of Egypt's consolidated IP statute protects "databases, whether readable by computer or otherwise" as a category of copyrightable work (Art. 140(3)), not through a separate EU-style sui generis database right: protection rests on the database being an original compilation, the same footing as a computer program. Even where a personal-use or teaching exception would otherwise apply, the author may still prevent reproduction or copying of all or a substantial part of a database.
The Law's exceptions are enumerated rather than a general fair-use standard: personal non-commercial copying, analysis or quotation for criticism or information, short extracts for teaching, and narrow library, archiving, and legal-proceeding copying (Art. 171); none addresses text-and-data-mining or AI training. The Law has been amended several times since 2002, most recently up to Law No. 178 of 2020.
When LexLint raises it
When your app profile says your app crawls the web or trains models.
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