Copyright Act 1994, Fair Dealing and No Text-and-Data-Mining Exception
Copyright Act 1994 (NZ), No 143, ss. 2, 42, 43
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 1 January 1995.
A copyright and text and data mining (TDM) rule binding public and private bodies.
As of 6 September 2026.
What it requires
- A use of a work is not infringing if it is fair dealing for criticism or review (with sufficient acknowledgement) or for reporting current events, or fair dealing for research or private study; training an AI model on copyrighted text does not fit either purpose as such, and no text-and-data-mining exception is available.
If you get it wrong
Private right of actionYes
What it reaches
Obligation class
TDM
What this law does
Drafted with AI from the cited sources under the direction of UnGovr staff. UnGovr holds editorial responsibility for this page.
Sections 42 and 43 permit fair dealing with a work for criticism, review, and news reporting, and for research or private study, but the Act carries no exception for text and data mining, so training a model on scraped copyrighted text must fit one of these narrow purposes or infringe.
Section 2's definition of literary work includes a table or compilation, so a scraped compilation of data can attract copyright as a literary work if its selection or arrangement is original, but the Act contains no separate sui generis database right, so a database that is a mere compilation of facts without originality in selection or arrangement receives no protection.
When LexLint raises it
crawls_webtrains_models
Read the law
official consolidated Act text, New Zealand Legislation