SyriaCopyright Law, No Text-and-Data-Mining Exception
Law No. 62 of 2013 on Copyright and Related Rights, Art. 40 (Database and Software Exceptions)
In force.
A copyright and text and data mining (TDM) rule binding public and private bodies.
- Audit expectation
- none
What it requires
- Syria's Copyright Law lets the legitimate holder of a database copy it for private purposes only where the database is non-electronic, and lets a licensee access a database's content only for the licensee's own use; neither exception authorizes extracting or reusing a protected database's contents for another purpose, including training a machine-learning model.
- The Law creates no text-and-data-mining-specific exception and no machine-readable opt-out mechanism, so training a model on scraped copyrighted text is not clearly authorized outside the Law's narrow, purpose-bound exceptions for backup, format conversion, accessibility, education, scientific research, or public security.
These lines are LexLint's reading of the law's text.
What it makes you log
Logging duty
Article 40 sets out the exceptions for software and databases: a lawful holder of a program copy may make up to three backup copies, move it between environments and convert its format for people with special needs (paragraph (a)); paragraph (b) requires the original and other copies to be destroyed once the legal title to the original lapses; and paragraph (c) lets a database licensee do what is necessary to reach its content for the licensee's own use. The destruction rule limits copies of a program and is not a log or record. No clause of article 40 requires anyone to create, keep, produce or review a log or record, and the Law has no territorial clause in the article, so no hook is recorded.
- Kind
- None
- As of
What this law does
Article 40 permits the legitimate holder of a copy of a computer program to make backup copies where the original is lost or unusable, to port the copy to a new computing environment where necessary for compatibility and limited to the holder's own private use, and to convert a work's format to serve persons with special needs.
The same article separately permits a licensee of a database to carry out all acts necessary to access the database's content for the licensee's own use without the database author's authorization, and permits the legitimate holder of a database, without the author's authorization and without compensation, to copy and reproduce a non-electronic database for private purposes, to use it exclusively for illustration in education or scientific research with the source identified, or to use it for public-security or administrative and judicial-procedure purposes.
None of these exceptions is a general text-and-data-mining exception or a machine-readable opt-out mechanism of the kind the European Union's Digital Single Market Directive creates: each is scoped to a named, narrow purpose, and none authorizes copying a copyrighted work, or extracting and reusing the contents of a protected database, for the purpose of training a machine-learning model.
The Law protects a database as a derivative work only where its selection or arrangement is an original intellectual creation, which is a compilation-copyright standard rather than a sui generis database right of the kind the European Union's Database Directive creates. Article 3 of the decree issuing the Law puts it in force six months after its publication in the Official Gazette, and no Gazette notice giving the publication day has been located.
When LexLint raises it
When your app profile says your app crawls the web or trains models.
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