Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Protection Act 6 of 1994, Fair Dealing and Compilation Protection
Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Protection Act 6 of 1994, ss. 2, 15-16
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 15 March 1996.
A copyright and text and data mining (TDM) rule binding public and private bodies.
As of 7 September 2026.
What it requires
- Confirm that any reproduction of a literary or musical work stays within what section 15's fair dealing exceptions actually allow (research or private study, criticism or review, or reporting a current event) before scraping, storing, or redistributing that content at scale.
- Treat a scraped table or compilation as a protected literary work like any other, since Namibia extends copyright to tables and compilations rather than providing a separate database right; assembling a compilation by scraping copies protected structure and content the same way copying a passage of prose would.
- Do not rely on a text-and-data-mining-specific exception or a machine-readable opt-out signal to justify training on Namibian-sourced copyrighted text, since the Act provides neither; any such use has to fit within the general fair dealing exceptions in section 15.
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 15(1)(a) excuses fair dealing in the use of a literary or musical work for the purpose of research or private study, or the personal or private use, of the person using the work. Section 15(1)(c) separately excuses fair dealing for the purpose of reporting on a current event in a newspaper, magazine or similar periodical, or by means of broadcasting or in a cinematograph film.
Section 16 permits a further reproduction of a work in circumstances to be prescribed, provided the reproduction does not conflict with a normal exploitation of the work and is not unreasonably prejudicial to the owner's legitimate interests, echoing the same three-step structure without creating a text-and-data-mining-specific exception or a machine-readable reservation mechanism.
Section 2 defines "literary work" to include "tables and compilations," so a database or dataset is protected, if at all, as a compilation-type literary work rather than under a separate sui generis database right; a computer program is expressly excluded from that definition and is instead a distinct category of protected work under section 14.
When LexLint raises it
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