Copyright Law, news and quotation exceptions

Section 16 excludes "news of the day or miscellaneous facts having the character of mere items of press information" from copyright or related-rights protection, so a bare fact carries no protection at all regardless of any exception.

Section 26 separately permits, without the right holder's authorization, quotation of a part of a lawfully published work, provided the quotation complies with fair practice, does not exceed the extent justified by its purpose, and is accompanied by an indication of source and the author's name.

Section 29 permits reproducing, broadcasting, or communicating to the public current political, economic, or religious articles from a published newspaper or periodical, subject to a proviso that the right holder may expressly prohibit that reproduction. It separately permits, for the purpose of reporting current events, reproducing or broadcasting short excerpts of an already-published or broadcast work, to the extent justified and not for a commercial purpose.

Neither provision carries a headline-length or short-extract cap distinct from its own fair-practice or current-events test, and no reported Myanmar decision applies either to a systematic news aggregator rather than an individual quoting a published work.

Neighbouring rights under the Law extend to performers and broadcasting organisations, not to a print or online news publisher's own reporting, so Myanmar confers no publisher-side neighbouring right of the kind the European Union's Digital Single Market Directive Article 15 creates. The Law's own commencement is deferred to a date the President sets by notification; no such notification is among the sources cited for this instrument, so status is recorded as enacted rather than in effect.