NamibiaCopyright and Neighbouring Rights Protection Act 6 of 1994, Fair Dealing and Compilation Protection
Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Protection Act 6 of 1994, ss. 2, 15-16
In force since .
A copyright and text and data mining (TDM) rule binding public and private bodies.
- Audit expectation
- none
What it requires
- Confirm that any reproduction of a literary or musical work stays within what section 15's fair dealing exceptions actually allow (research or private study, criticism or review, or reporting a current event) before scraping, storing, or redistributing that content at scale.
- Treat a scraped table or compilation as a protected literary work like any other, since Namibia extends copyright to tables and compilations rather than providing a separate database right; assembling a compilation by scraping copies protected structure and content the same way copying a passage of prose would.
- Do not rely on a text-and-data-mining-specific exception or a machine-readable opt-out signal to justify training on Namibian-sourced copyrighted text, since the Act provides neither; any such use has to fit within the general fair dealing exceptions in section 15.
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
What it makes you log
Logging duty
Section 15 lets fair dealing for research, private study, criticism, review or news reporting, judicial proceedings and quotation proceed without infringement, naming the source and author where required; section 16 permits reproduction in prescribed circumstances that do not conflict with normal exploitation; section 2 defines a literary work to include tables and compilations. They condition the exceptions and require no log or record, and no territorial test is stated in them, so the hook is empty.
- Kind
- None
- As of
What this law does
Section 15(1)(a) excuses fair dealing in the use of a literary or musical work for the purpose of research or private study, or the personal or private use, of the person using the work. Section 15(1)(c) separately excuses fair dealing for the purpose of reporting on a current event in a newspaper, magazine or similar periodical, or by means of broadcasting or in a cinematograph film.
Section 16 permits a further reproduction of a work in circumstances to be prescribed, provided the reproduction does not conflict with a normal exploitation of the work and is not unreasonably prejudicial to the owner's legitimate interests, echoing the same three-step structure without creating a text-and-data-mining-specific exception or a machine-readable reservation mechanism.
Section 2 defines "literary work" to include "tables and compilations," so a database or dataset is protected, if at all, as a compilation-type literary work rather than under a separate sui generis database right; a computer program is expressly excluded from that definition and is instead a distinct category of protected work under section 14.
When LexLint raises it
When your app profile says your app crawls the web or trains models.
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