MalaysiaCopyright Act 1987, fair dealing exception and absence of a text-and-data-mining exception or database right
Copyright Act 1987 (Act 332), s. 13(2)(a) and s. 13(2A) (Fair Dealing)
In force since .
A copyright and text and data mining (TDM) rule binding public and private bodies.
- Audit expectation
- none
What it requires
- A fair dealing exception may excuse limited reproduction, quotation, or reporting of another's copyright work for research, private study, criticism, review, or reporting news or current events, weighed against the purpose, nature, amount used, and market effect of the dealing.
- Malaysia has no text-and-data-mining exception or database right, so reproducing or extracting a substantial part of a work or database to train a model is not otherwise excused.
These lines are LexLint's reading of the law's text.
What it makes you log
Logging duty
Section 13(2)(a) excludes fair dealing for research, private study, criticism, review or news reporting from the right to control reproduction, on condition that the title and author are acknowledged (not required for news by sound recording, film or broadcast). The Act has no text-and-data-mining exception and no database right in the sections cited. The condition is an acknowledgement and not a record the user keeps. Section 13(1) frames the right as the exclusive right to control acts in Malaysia, which describes where the right operates and is not a territorial test on the exception, so the hook is empty.
- Kind
- None
- As of
What this law does
Section 13(2)(a) excuses, from the exclusive rights in section 13(1), any act done by way of fair dealing for the purposes of research, private study, criticism, review, or the reporting of news or current events, provided the title and authorship of the work are acknowledged, except that no acknowledgment is required for news or current events reported by sound recording, film, or broadcast.
Section 13(2A), inserted by the Copyright (Amendment) Act 2012 (Act A1420, in force ), directs that whether a dealing is fair turns on the purpose and character of the dealing including whether it is commercial or non-profit educational, the nature of the work, the amount and substantiality of the portion used, and the effect on the potential market for the work. Section 7(2A) excludes any idea, procedure, method of operation, or mathematical concept from copyright protection.
Section 7(3)(a) requires only that sufficient effort be expended to make a work original in character, with no separate exclusion of the news of the day or mere facts of the kind some other jurisdictions' copyright statutes carry.
Malaysia has no text-and-data-mining exception and no sui generis database right; reproducing or extracting a substantial part of a copyright work to train a model, or extracting a substantial part of a database's contents, therefore rests only on the general fair dealing ground above, where it can be characterised as research, and is not otherwise excused.
When LexLint raises it
When your app profile says your app crawls the web or trains models.
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