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Law / Maldives

Copyright and Related Rights Act, quotation and informational-purpose exceptions

Copyright and Related Rights Act (Law No. 23/2010), ss. 10, 12(b)(3), 14, 17

In force since .

A copyright and text and data mining (TDM) rule binding public and private bodies.

Obligation class
Attribution
Audit expectation
none

What it requires

  • Do not reproduce more than a short part of a published work as a quotation unless the reproduction is compatible with fair practice and does not exceed what the purpose justifies, and, where the work shows the author's name, state the author's name, the source and the manner of publication.
  • Limit any copy made under section 29-4 to one made by a person permitted to use the work, solely for a study not for commercial advantage, to make a computational analysis of the data recorded in it, and do not rely on the quotation exception, the informational-purpose exception, or the personal-use reproduction exception to reproduce a full copyrighted work, or the whole or a substantial part of a database, to train a model.
  • Reproducing a newspaper or periodical article on current economic, social or religious topics, or a short excerpt of a work for reporting a current event, is permitted without authorization only with the author identified and the source disclosed as far as possible, and only where the author or copyright owner has not stated in advance that it may not be used without permission.

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
MIT mitigations Draft
  • 3.2Data Governance
FINOS AIGF
  • AIR-PREV-007Legal and Contractual Frameworks for AI Systems
  • AIR-DET-013Providing Citations and Source Traceability for AI-Generated Information

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 32(a), as rewritten by Law 31 of 2024, makes it an offence to act intentionally in a way that impairs a right the Act protects, or to do so knowing it will harm the copyright owner. The court fixes a fine between MVR 50,000 and MVR 300,000 according to the scale of the act (section 32(b)), and may fix twice that penalty for each repetition (section 32(d)). The text states no prison term.

Penalty structure

Section 32(a), as rewritten by Law 31 of 2024, makes it an offence to act intentionally in a way that impairs a right the Act protects, or to do so knowing it will harm the copyright owner. Section 32(b) sets a court-fixed fine between MVR 50,000 and MVR 300,000 according to the scale of the act, and section 32(d) lets the court fix twice that penalty for each repetition. Section 31-1(a)(2), also added by Law 31 of 2024, separately lets the court fine an infringer who acted intentionally or without reasonable care between MVR 10,000 and MVR 100,000 and award the fine to the copyright owner, and section 33(b) sets a fine between MVR 1,000 and MVR 100,000 for circumventing a technical protection measure or rights-management information.

Rule
Fixed only
As of
Currency
MVR
Fixed cap
300,000

Statutory damages

Section 31-1(a)(2), added by Law 31 of 2024, lets the court fine an infringer who acted intentionally or without reasonable care between MVR 10,000 and MVR 100,000, according to the scale of the act, and award the fine to the copyright owner. The amount is fixed by the court within that range; the text states no per-work or per-person sum.

As of
Currency
MVR

Who enforces it

Enforcement body

Copyright owners sue in the competent court under section 30(a); the court fixes the fine for an offence under section 32.

Settledness

As of
Open questions
  • Does the section 29-4 condition that the copy be made solely for a study not for commercial advantage allow a commercial developer to copy a work in order to train a model?
  • Does a person who is permitted to use a work under section 29-4(a), the opening words of the exception, include someone who obtained the work by scraping a website without the owner's licence?

What it makes you log

Logging duty

Section 14 permits quotation of a short part of a published work consistent with fair practice, with source and author named; section 12 permits one private copy (excluding the whole or a substantial part of a database in digital form); section 13 permits temporary reproduction that deletes itself; section 17 covers informatory uses. They limit copying and require no log or record. Section 2 (the Act protects works produced in the Maldives and by nationals of treaty states) is the Act's protection scope and not a territorial test on these exceptions, so the hook is empty. The cited Dhivehi gazette copies are PDFs whose text layer is not readable; the WIPO English translation is the text relied on.

Kind
None
As of

What this law does

Drafted with AI

Drafted with AI from the cited sources under the direction of UnGovr staff. UnGovr holds editorial responsibility for this page. How this site is made

Research summary

Legal information, not legal advice. This is LexLint's own research summary of a public legal source, and it creates no attorney-client relationship. For decisions that matter, consult qualified counsel in the relevant jurisdiction. About LexLint

Section 14(a), as amended by Law 31 of 2024, permits reusing a small amount of a published work as a quotation without the permission of the author or copyright owner, fairly and to no greater extent than the activity requires. Section 14(b) requires a quotation from a published work that shows the author's name to state the author's name, the source and the manner of publication.

Section 17(a) permits reproducing in a newspaper or periodical, or broadcasting or otherwise communicating to the public, an article published in a newspaper or periodical on current economic, social or religious topics, unless the author or copyright owner has stated in advance that it may not be used without permission. Section 17 requires the author to be identified and the source disclosed as far as possible.

Section 17(c) permits reproducing short excerpts of a work seen or heard in the course of a current event, for the purpose of reporting it. Section 29-4, added by Law 31 of 2024, permits a person who is permitted to use a work to copy it solely for a study not for commercial advantage, to make a computational analysis of the data recorded in the work.

Section 12(b)(3) expressly excludes reproduction of the whole or a substantial part of a database in digital form from the separate personal-use reproduction exception, so copying a scraped database to train a model cannot rest on that exception.

When LexLint raises it

When your app profile says your app crawls the web, trains models or reuses other publishers' content.

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