UgandaCopyright and Neighbouring Rights Act, Chapter 222, fair use
Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Act, Chapter 222, s. 14 (fair use)
In force since .
A copyright and text and data mining (TDM) rule binding public and private bodies.
- Obligation class
- TDM
- Audit expectation
- none
What it requires
- A quotation from a published work, including a press summary, is not an infringement where it is compatible with fair practice, no more extensive than the purpose justifies, and credits the source work.
- Reproducing an enactment, a court decision, a government inquiry report, or the news of the day (fresh reports of current events, including from the internet) does not infringe copyright, because these are excluded from protection outright.
- There is no text-and-data-mining exception and no database right in Uganda: training on or extracting from a compiled dataset of copyrighted works rests only on the general fair-use grounds in section 14, if it can be characterised as one of them.
These lines are LexLint's reading of the law's text.
If you get it wrong
Criminal exposureYes
Criminal exposure note
Unauthorised publication, distribution, reproduction, public performance, broadcast, or communication of a protected work to the public is an offence carrying a fine of up to 2,500 currency points (UGX 50,000,000) or imprisonment of up to ten years, or both (s. 46(1)), as amended with effect from .
Penalty structure
Fine under section 46(1) as amended in 2026; the same subsection also allows imprisonment of up to ten years instead of or in addition to the fine.
- Rule
- Fixed only
- As of
- Currency
- UGX
- Fixed cap
- 50,000,000
What it makes you log
Logging duty
Section 14 of the Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Act (Chapter 222) lists the uses of a protected work that are fair use and need no consent: private personal use, quotation, teaching, news reporting, use in judicial proceedings, library reproduction on conditions the Minister prescribes, and transcription for persons with disabilities. It imposes no duty to create, keep, produce or review a log or record. The section names no territorial hook of its own.
- Kind
- None
- As of
What this law does
Section 14 permits the fair use of a protected work, without the copyright owner's consent, for private personal use, for a quotation from a published work (including a newspaper or periodical press summary) that is compatible with fair practice and acknowledges its source, for teaching purposes to the extent justified by way of illustration, for reproduction or communication of a work that can be seen or heard to the extent justified for the purpose when reporting on current events, and, since the Copyright and Neighbouring Rights (Amendment) Act, 2026, for use of a work in an online learning environment by an education institution, library, archive or museum.
Section 5 excludes ideas, concepts, procedures and methods from copyright protection outright, and section 6 excludes an enactment, a court decision, a government inquiry report, and the news of the day (reports of fresh events or current information by the media, whether published in written form, broadcast, on the internet, or by any other means) from copyright protection, holding the Government as trustee of those works for the public benefit.
The Act contains no text-and-data-mining exception and confers no sui generis database right; a compilation is protected, if at all, only as an ordinary literary work under section 4, and Uganda's related (neighbouring) rights cover only performances, sound recordings, broadcasts and programme-carrying signals.
Unauthorised publication, distribution, reproduction, public performance, broadcast, or communication of a protected work to the public is an offence under section 46(1), which since carries a fine of up to 2,500 currency points (UGX 50,000,000) or imprisonment of up to ten years, or both.
When LexLint raises it
When your app profile says your app crawls the web or trains models.
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