Copyright Act 1987, fair dealing exception and absence of a text-and-data-mining exception or database right

Section 13(2)(a) excuses, from the exclusive rights in section 13(1), any act done by way of fair dealing for the purposes of research, private study, criticism, review, or the reporting of news or current events, provided the title and authorship of the work are acknowledged, except that no acknowledgment is required for news or current events reported by sound recording, film, or broadcast.

Section 13(2A), inserted by the Copyright (Amendment) Act 2012 (Act A1420, in force 1 March 2012), directs that whether a dealing is fair turns on the purpose and character of the dealing including whether it is commercial or non-profit educational, the nature of the work, the amount and substantiality of the portion used, and the effect on the potential market for the work. Section 7(2A) excludes any idea, procedure, method of operation, or mathematical concept from copyright protection.

Section 7(3)(a) requires only that sufficient effort be expended to make a work original in character, with no separate exclusion of the news of the day or mere facts of the kind some other jurisdictions' copyright statutes carry.

Malaysia has no text-and-data-mining exception and no sui generis database right; reproducing or extracting a substantial part of a copyright work to train a model, or extracting a substantial part of a database's contents, therefore rests only on the general fair dealing ground above, where it can be characterised as research, and is not otherwise excused.