Copyright Act, fair dealing exceptions
Copyright Act, Cap. 252 (Act No. 12 of 2000, Revised Edition 2020), ss. 56-58
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 21 August 2000.
A copyright and text and data mining (TDM) rule binding public and private bodies.
As of 5 September 2026.
What it requires
- Reproducing copyrighted Belizean text for research, private study, or reporting current events may fall within fair dealing, but training a model on it or crawling it at scale has not been tested against the fair-dealing factors in a reported case.
- There is no text-and-data-mining exception or database right to rely on instead.
If you get it wrong
Criminal exposureNo
What it reaches
Obligation class
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.
Section 56 permits fair dealing with a protected work for the purpose of research or private study. Section 57(2) separately permits fair dealing with a protected work, other than a photograph, for reporting current events, subject to a sufficient acknowledgement except where the reporting is by sound recording, film, broadcast, or cable programme.
Section 58 sets a four-factor fair-dealing test: the nature of the work, the extent and substantiality of the part used, the effect on the potential market for or commercial value of the work, and the purpose and character of the use. The Act contains no text-and-data-mining exception and no sui generis database right, so training a model on scraped copyrighted Belizean text rests only on whether the research or private-study ground, tested against the section 58 factors, can be made out.
Civil remedies, including injunction and delivery up, are the mechanism for infringement by reproduction; separate criminal offences under section 52 attach to commercial dealing in infringing physical articles rather than to digital reproduction.
When LexLint raises it
crawls_webtrains_models