Copyright and Related Rights Act, quotation and informational-purpose exceptions
Copyright and Related Rights Act (Law No. 23/2010), ss. 10, 12(b)(3), 14, 17
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
- Do not reproduce more than a short part of a published work as a quotation unless the reproduction is compatible with fair practice and does not exceed what the purpose justifies, and always indicate the source and the author's name.
- Do not rely on the quotation exception, the informational-purpose exception, or the personal-use reproduction exception to justify scraping and reproducing a full copyrighted work, or the whole or a substantial part of a database, for training a model; the Act creates no text-and-data-mining exception and expressly excludes database reproduction from the personal-use exception.
- Reproducing a newspaper or periodical article on current economic, political or religious topics, or a short excerpt of a work for reporting a current event, is permitted without authorization only with source and author attribution, and only where the right to authorize reproduction has not been expressly reserved.
If you get it wrong
Private right of actionYes
Penalty structure
Section 32(a) sets a court-fixed fine between MVR 50,000 and MVR 300,000 for deliberate or inadvertent infringement of a protected right, doubled to up to MVR 600,000 for a repeat infringement within five years of the first (s. 32(b)). Section 30(f) separately allows a fine between MVR 10,000 and MVR 300,000 where a party disobeys a court order against continuing infringement, and section 33(b) sets a fine between MVR 1,000 and MVR 100,000 for circumventing a technical protection measure or rights-management information.
- Rule
- Fixed only
- As of
- 6 September 2026
- Currency
- MVR
- Fixed cap
- 300,000
What it reaches
Obligation class
Attribution
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 14 permits quoting a short part of a published work without the author's authorization where the quotation is compatible with fair practice, does not exceed the extent the purpose justifies, and carries an indication of source and the author's name.
Section 17(a) separately permits reproducing a newspaper or periodical article on current economic, political or religious topics, unless the right to authorize reproduction has been expressly reserved on the copies, and section 17(c) permits reproducing short excerpts of a work for the purpose of reporting a current event; both require source and author attribution.
The Act creates no text-and-data-mining exception, and section 12(b)(3) expressly excludes reproduction of the whole or a substantial part of a database in digital form from the separate personal-use reproduction exception, so training a model on scraped copyrighted text or a scraped database cannot rest on either exception.
When LexLint raises it
crawls_webtrains_modelsaggregates_content
Read the law
Courtesy English translation of the Copyright and Related Rights Act (Law No. 23/2010), WIPO Lex
the current Dhivehi text is amended through Act No. 31/2024 and this English translation reflects only the earlier 2010 version