Law on Copyright and Neighboring Rights, exceptions and absence of a text-and-data-mining exception
Royal Decree No. 65/2008, Arts. 4, 20
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 18 May 2008.
A copyright and text and data mining (TDM) rule binding public and private bodies.
As of 6 September 2026.
What it requires
- Do not rely on the Law's Article 20 free-uses list (quotation for clarification or criticism, personal or educational use, or a single lawfully-owned computer-program copy) to reproduce Omani-copyrighted text for training an AI or machine-learning model; none of them reaches that use, and the Law has no text-and-data-mining exception.
If you get it wrong
Criminal exposureYes
Criminal exposure note
Article 52 punishes copyright infringement, without prejudice to a more severe sanction under any other law, with imprisonment of three months to three years and a fine of 2,000 to 10,000 Omani Rial, or either penalty.
Penalty structure
Article 52's general infringement penalty: imprisonment of three months to three years and a fine of 2,000 to 10,000 Omani Rial, or either penalty.
- Rule
- Fixed only
- As of
- 6 September 2026
- Currency
- OMR
- Fixed cap
- 10,000
What this law does
Drafted with AI from the cited sources under the direction of UnGovr staff. UnGovr holds editorial responsibility for this page.
Article 4 excludes mere ideas, procedures, working methods, mathematical concepts, principles, discoveries, and data from copyright protection, along with official documents and news of the day and current events that are mere journalistic information, though a compilation or arrangement of that excluded material is protected where it is itself distinguished.
Article 20 permits, without the author's consent, quoting paragraphs from a protected work lawfully made available to the public for clarification, explanation, or criticism, to the extent justified by that purpose, and permits the lawful owner of a copy of a computer program to reproduce a single copy for the purpose and extent the program was obtained, for archival purposes, or to replace a lost or destroyed copy.
Neither Article 20 nor any other section located creates a text-and-data-mining exception or a machine-readable reservation mechanism, so training a model on scraped Omani-copyrighted text or copying more than the narrow free-uses allowance rests on none of the Law's own exceptions.
Article 52 punishes copyright infringement, without prejudice to a more severe sanction under any other law, with imprisonment of three months to three years and a fine of 2,000 to 10,000 Omani Rial, or either penalty.
When LexLint raises it
crawls_webtrains_models