Law No. 3 of 1971 on Copyright, as amended by CPA Order No. 83, compilation protection and reproduction right (Arts. 2, 3, 8, 45)
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 1 May 2004.
A database right rule binding public and private bodies.
As of 7 September 2026.
What it requires
- Do not reproduce, in any manner or form including onto a digital or electronic storage medium, a protected work, including a compilation of data, without the written permission of the author or the author's successors.
- A first violation is treated as an act of piracy carrying a fine of at least 5,000,000 dinars; a repeat violation exposes the offender to imprisonment of five to ten years or a fine of 100,000,000 to 200,000,000 dinars, at the court's discretion.
If you get it wrong
Criminal exposureYes
Private right of actionNo
Criminal exposure note
A first act of piracy under Article 45 is punishable by a fine of not less than 5,000,000 dinars and not more than 10,000,000 dinars. On a subsequent conviction, the offender is sentenced to imprisonment of not less than five and not more than ten years and to a fine of not less than 100,000,000 dinars and not more than 200,000,000 dinars, or to either penalty alone; the court may also order closure of the establishment used to commit the offense and forfeiture and destruction of the infringing copies and the equipment used to make them.
Penalty structure
First-offense band under Art. 45(1). A subsequent conviction escalates to imprisonment of five to ten years or a fine of 100,000,000 to 200,000,000 dinars, at the court's discretion between the two, rather than a further multiple of this fixed band.
- Rule
- Fixed only
- As of
- 7 September 2026
- Minimum
- 5,000,000
- Currency
- IQD
- Fixed cap
- 10,000,000
What it reaches
Obligation class
Prohibition
What this law does
Drafted with AI from the cited sources under the direction of UnGovr staff. UnGovr holds editorial responsibility for this page.
Coalition Provisional Authority Order No. 83 amended Iraq's 1971 Copyright Law to bring it into line with WTO intellectual-property standards. As amended, Article 2 lists compilations of data among the protected work types alongside computer programs, so a database attracts protection as a compilation rather than through a separate database right of its own.
Article 8 gives the author the exclusive right to reproduce a work in any manner or form, whether transitory or permanent, including onto a digital or electronic storage medium, and no person may do so without the author's or successors' written permission; the amended text carries no text-and-data-mining exception or AI-training-specific rule.
Article 45 makes unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or commercial use of a protected work an act of piracy, and no located Iraqi decision construes how the reproduction right applies to a scraper copying a publicly posted, unauthenticated compilation of data.
When LexLint raises it
crawls_webtrains_models