Intellectual Property Act, fair use and compilations of data
Intellectual Property Act, No. 36 of 2003, ss. 7, 8(c), 11
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.
A copyright and text and data mining (TDM) rule binding public and private bodies.
As of 6 September 2026.
What it requires
- Sri Lanka has no text-and-data-mining exception; reproducing a copyrighted Sri Lankan-hosted work for crawling or AI training relies only on the general fair use test, weighing the purpose and commercial character of the use, the nature of the work, the amount used, and the effect on the work's market.
- News of the day, as such, carries no copyright protection and may be reproduced without a fair-use analysis.
- A collection or compilation of data is protected only for the originality of its selection, coordination, or arrangement; the underlying data or material is not itself protected, and no separate database right attaches merely because assembling it took investment or effort.
If you get it wrong
Private right of actionYes
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 11(1)-(2) gives Sri Lanka an American-style fair use defence: the fair use of a work for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship or research is not an infringement, judged by the purpose and character of the use (including whether it is commercial), the nature of the work, the amount and substantiality of the portion used, and the effect on the potential market for or value of the work.
The Act has no text-and-data-mining exception distinct from this general fair use test, so training a model on scraped Sri Lankan-hosted text rests only on whether that training can be characterised as fair use under these four factors, a question no reported Sri Lankan decision has answered. Section 8(c) excludes "news of the day" from copyright protection altogether.
Section 7(1)(b) protects a collection of works or a collection of mere data (a database), in machine-readable or other form, as a work only where the collection is original by reason of the selection, coordination, or arrangement of its contents; the underlying data itself is not protected, and Sri Lanka confers no sui generis database right of the kind that protects a compilation assembled through investment or effort alone regardless of originality. Section 1 of the Act carries no commencement clause of its own, and none has been located elsewhere in the Act.
When LexLint raises it
crawls_webtrains_models
Read the law
Official Act text, National Intellectual Property Office of Sri Lanka