FijiCopyright Act 1999, Fair Dealing and Criminal Liability for Infringement
Copyright Act, 1999 (Act No. 11 of 1999), ss. 41-42, 121
A copyright and text and data mining (TDM) rule binding public and private bodies.
- Obligation class
- TDM
- Audit expectation
- none
What it requires
- A use of a work is not infringing if it is fair dealing for criticism or review of that or another work, accompanied by a sufficient acknowledgement, or fair dealing for reporting current events, or fair dealing for research or private study by an individual; training an AI model on copyrighted text does not fit any of those purposes as such, and no text-and-data-mining exception is available.
- Making for sale or hire, importing other than for private and domestic use, or possessing in the course of a business with a view to committing an infringing act, an object that is and that you know or ought reasonably to know is an infringing copy of a copyright work is an offence.
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 exposureYes
Private right of actionYes
Criminal exposure note
Under s. 121(5)(a), a person convicted of an offence under s. 121(1) is liable to a fine of $5,000 for every infringing copy to which the offence relates, not exceeding $50,000 in respect of the same transaction, and to imprisonment for 12 months; under s. 121(5)(b), an offence under s. 121(2) or (3) instead draws a fixed fine of $50,000 and imprisonment for 12 months; under s. 121(5)(c), a second or subsequent such offence draws a fine of $100,000 and imprisonment for 2 years.
Penalty structure
Under s. 121(5)(a), a fine of $5,000 for every infringing copy to which an offence under s. 121(1) relates, not exceeding $50,000 in respect of the same transaction, plus imprisonment for 12 months. An offence under s. 121(2) or (3) instead draws a fixed fine of $50,000 and imprisonment for 12 months under s. 121(5)(b), rising to a fine of $100,000 and imprisonment for 2 years for a second or subsequent such offence under s. 121(5)(c). The Act states these figures in dollars, understood here as Fiji dollars.
- Rule
- Per violation only
- As of
- Currency
- FJD
- Fixed cap
- 50,000
- Per violation unit
- Violation
- Per violation amount
- 5,000
Who enforces it
Enforcement body
Fiji Police Force and the courts of Fiji, on prosecution for an offence under s. 121; a copyright owner may separately bring civil infringement proceedings
Settledness
- As of
- Open questions
- Does copying a work to train an AI model count as copying 'for the purposes of research or private study by an individual' under section 42(1) when the person copying is a company rather than an individual, and does a collective licence 'of which the individual is or should be aware' take the copying outside the exception?
- Did the Minister's notice under section 1(2) commence sections 41, 42 and 121 on a date that can be shown from the Gazette, given that the Act commences 'on a date or dates appointed by the Minister by notice in the Gazette'?
What it makes you log
Logging duty
Sections 41 and 42 permit fair dealing for criticism, review, news reporting, research and private study, and section 121 makes dealing in infringing copies an offence. They impose no duty to create, keep, produce or review a log or record, and they carry no territorial clause of their own.
- Kind
- None
- As of
What this law does
The Act received assent on . Section 1(2) provides that it commences on a date or dates the Minister appoints by notice in the Gazette, rather than upon assent, and no specific commencement notice has been located.
Sections 41 and 42 permit fair dealing with a work for criticism, review, and news reporting and for research or private study by an individual, but the Act carries no exception for text and data mining, so training a model on scraped copyrighted text must fit one of those narrow purposes or infringe.
Section 2's definition of literary work includes a table or compilation, so a scraped compilation can attract copyright as a literary work if its selection or arrangement is original, but the Act creates no separate sui generis database right.
Section 121 makes it an offence, other than pursuant to a copyright licence, to make for sale or hire, import, possess in the course of a business, or otherwise deal with an object that is an infringing copy of a copyright work, and section 13 binds the State to the Act on the same terms as any other person.
When LexLint raises it
When your app profile says your app crawls the web or trains models.
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