LesothoCopyright Order, 1989, Absence of a Text-and-Data-Mining Exception or Database Right
Copyright Order, 1989 (Order No. 13 of 1989), ss. 2, 5
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Read from a public archive copy, not the publisher directly. The publisher does not serve this page to automated readers, so a direct fetch was not an option here; how we access sources. Archived 2023. Publisher's page: https://wipolex-res.wipo.int/edocs/lexdocs/laws/en/ls/ls003en.pdfIn force.
A copyright and text and data mining (TDM) rule binding public and private bodies.
- Audit expectation
- none
What it requires
- Obtain a licence from the rights holder before reproducing copyrighted literary, artistic or scientific expression at scale for AI-training purposes; bare facts and data are not protected and may be collected without one.
- Do not rely on a text-and-data-mining exception, because none exists in this Order; any large-scale automated reproduction of protected expression must fit within the ordinary free-use exceptions in section 9 or be licensed.
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
Criminal exposure note
Section 37(1): a person who violates or causes to be violated the rights protected under the Order commits an offence and is liable, on conviction, to a fine of M12,000 or imprisonment for five years, or both, without prejudice to the separate civil remedies (interdict and damages) available under section 36.
Penalty structure
Section 37(1) is the general infringement offence covering violation of the copyright protected under Part II of the Order (the provision that would reach unauthorized bulk reproduction of protected expression); the Order's other, higher offence tiers in section 37(2)-(7) attach to folklore-specific and broadcasting-specific conduct rather than to ordinary literary or artistic copyright infringement.
- Rule
- Fixed only
- As of
- Currency
- LSL
- Fixed cap
- 12,000
What it makes you log
Logging duty
Section 5 excludes from protection court and administrative decisions, news of the day, and mere communications of facts and data. 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 3 grants copyright protection to original literary, artistic and scientific works by the sole fact of their creation, and section 2's closed list of "literary, artistic and scientific" works does not extend to a table, compilation, or database as such, so Lesotho has no sui generis database right and no separate compilation-specific protection; a database is protected, if at all, only to the extent its selection or arrangement of content is itself an original literary or artistic work.
Section 5(c) excludes "mere communications of facts and data" from protection altogether, so bulk collection of unadorned factual data is outside the scope of copyright from the start.
The Order enacts no text-and-data-mining exception of any kind, so large-scale automated reproduction of copyrighted expression (as opposed to bare facts) for AI-training purposes falls to be justified, if at all, under the ordinary "Free use" exceptions in section 9, none of which is framed around automated or machine collection.
A person whose economic rights under section 7 are infringed, including by unauthorized reproduction beyond a section 9 exception, may seek an interdict and damages under section 36, and separately faces criminal liability under section 37(1) for violating the rights the Order protects. Section 1 provides that the Order comes into operation on a date to be appointed by the Minister by notice in the Gazette, and no such commencement notice has been located.
When LexLint raises it
When your app profile says your app crawls the web or trains models.
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