Law on Copyright and Related Rights, Content Limitations (No Text-and-Data-Mining Exception)
A citation is an address, not a summary. The first part names the law; what follows narrows it to the exact section, article or paragraph.
In force since 11 August 2010.
A copyright and text and data mining (TDM) rule binding public and private bodies.
As of 6 September 2026.
What it requires
- Do not reproduce, distribute, make available, or otherwise exploit a copyrighted work, including for training a model on it, without a transfer of the relevant right or a license, because the Law recognizes no general text-and-data-mining or fair-use exception beyond its closed list of specific limitations.
- Reproducing only subject matter the Law excludes outright, such as bare daily news, official legislative or judicial texts, or ideas and procedures, does not implicate copyright.
- Rely only on a listed specific exception, such as the quotation exception, to justify reproducing a copyrighted work without a license; a generic fair-use argument is not available.
If you get it wrong
Criminal exposureNo
Private right of actionYes
Criminal exposure note
Unauthorized exploitation of a copyrighted work is a misdemeanor (prekrsaj) under art. 170, not a criminal offense (krivicno djelo), so no separate criminal-code prosecution attaches to this Law's own violations.
Penalty structure
Article 170(1) sets a misdemeanor fine of BAM 1,000 to BAM 200,000 for a legal entity and BAM 1,000 to BAM 20,000 for an entrepreneur who exploits a work, its performance, or its database without the required transfer of rights, among other listed acts. Article 170(2) fines the responsible natural person within that legal entity or entrepreneur BAM 3,000 to BAM 20,000 for the same conduct, and art. 170(3) fines a natural person acting alone BAM 3,000 to BAM 10,000.
- Rule
- Fixed only
- As of
- 6 September 2026
- Minimum
- 1,000
- Currency
- BAM
- Fixed cap
- 200,000
What it reaches
Obligation class
Licensing, TDM
What this law does
Drafted with AI from the cited sources under the direction of UnGovr staff. UnGovr holds editorial responsibility for this page.
Article 40(1) states that content limitations of copyright are possible only in the cases provided for in the Law's own chapter on limitations, so the Law recognizes no residual fair-use or fair-dealing ground beyond that closed list.
The list, arts. 41 to 54, includes a statutory license for teaching materials and periodicals, free-use grounds such as private reproduction, quotation, and parody, and a database-specific limitation for an authorized user's normal use, but contains no exception naming text-and-data-mining, machine reading, or automated analysis; the Law predates the European Union's 2019 Digital Single Market Directive and its Articles 3 and 4 text-and-data-mining exceptions and has not been amended to add an equivalent.
Separately, art. 8(1) excludes ideas, procedures and methods, official legislative, administrative and judicial texts, political and courtroom speeches, daily news and brief press notices, and folk literary and artistic creations from copyright protection outright, so a scraper reproducing only that excluded subject matter does not implicate copyright at all.
When LexLint raises it
crawls_webtrains_models
Read the law
Law on Copyright and Related Rights
Official Gazette of Bosnia and Herzegovina No. 63/10 (adopted 13 July 2010, published 3 August 2010), WIPO Lex record and full text