Sri LankaIntellectual Property Act, fair use and compilations of data
Intellectual Property Act, No. 36 of 2003, ss. 7, 8(c), 11
In force since .
A copyright and text and data mining (TDM) rule binding public and private bodies.
- Obligation class
- Prohibition
- Audit expectation
- none
What it requires
- Reproducing a copyrighted work for crawling or AI training must qualify as fair use under the general test, weighing the purpose and commercial character of the use, the nature of the work, the amount used, and the effect on the work's market.
- News of the day, as such, carries no copyright protection and may be reproduced without a fair-use analysis.
- A collection or compilation of data is protected only for the originality of its selection, coordination, or arrangement; the underlying data or material is not itself protected, and no separate database right attaches merely because assembling it took investment or effort.
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
Section 178(1): wilful infringement of the rights protected under Part II is an offence punishable on conviction before a Magistrate with a fine not exceeding rupees 500,000 or imprisonment not exceeding six months, or both, doubled on a second or subsequent conviction.
Penalty structure
Section 178 makes wilful infringement of the rights protected under Part II an offence tried by a Magistrate: a fine not exceeding rupees 500,000, or imprisonment not exceeding six months, or both; on a second or subsequent conviction the fine or term may be doubled, which gives the 1,000,000 rupee ceiling this row carries.
- Rule
- Fixed only
- As of
- Currency
- LKR
- Fixed cap
- 1,000,000
Statutory damages
Section 170(10): an owner of rights protected under the Act may elect, before final judgment, statutory damages instead of proved actual damages, of not less than rupees 50,000 and not more than rupees one million for any infringement involved in the action. The range is per infringement in the action, not per person.
- As of
- Currency
- LKR
- Per person minimum
- 50,000
Who enforces it
Enforcement body
Right holders, through the courts (sections 22 and 170); the offence in section 178 is tried by a Magistrate.
Settledness
- As of
- Open questions
- Does the fair use defence in section 11(1) of the Intellectual Property Act reach reproduction of a work by a web crawler for training an AI model, given that it lists criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship or research as purposes?
- Does the originality test in section 7(1)(b) leave the contents of a collection of mere data unprotected against extraction where its selection, co-ordination or arrangement is not copied?
What it makes you log
Logging duty
Section 7 protects collections of data that are original in the selection, co-ordination or arrangement of their contents, section 8 excludes mere data and other matter from protection, and section 11 states the fair-use exception. It imposes no duty to create, keep, produce or review a log or record. The cited sections carry no territorial clause.
- Kind
- None
- As of
What this law does
Section 11(1)-(2) gives Sri Lanka an American-style fair use defence: the fair use of a work for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship or research is not an infringement, judged by the purpose and character of the use (including whether it is commercial), the nature of the work, the amount and substantiality of the portion used, and the effect on the potential market for or value of the work.
Section 11(3) provides that the acts of fair use include the circumstances specified in section 12. Section 12(2)(c) excludes reproduction of the whole or a substantial part of a database from the private reproduction that section 12(1) permits. Section 8(c) excludes "news of the day" from copyright protection altogether.
Section 7(1)(b) protects a collection of works or a collection of mere data (a database), in machine-readable or other form, as a work only where the collection is original by reason of the selection, coordination, or arrangement of its contents; the underlying data itself is not protected, and Sri Lanka confers no sui generis database right of the kind that protects a compilation assembled through investment or effort alone regardless of originality.
The Speaker's certificate on the Act is dated 12th November, 2003. Under Article 80(1) of the Constitution, a Bill passed by Parliament becomes law when the certificate of the Speaker is endorsed on it.
When LexLint raises it
When your app profile says your app crawls the web or trains models.
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