Intellectual Property Code, Fair Use of a Copyrighted Work
Republic Act No. 8293 (1997), Section 185
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 1998.
A copyright and text and data mining (TDM) rule binding public and private bodies.
As of 7 September 2026.
What it requires
- Weigh the purpose and character of a use of a copyrighted work, the nature of the work, the amount used, and the effect on the work's market before relying on fair use to reproduce it for training data or aggregation.
- Reproducing a computer program's code to achieve interoperability with another independently created program may also qualify as fair use.
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 185 makes the fair use of a copyrighted work for criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, research, and similar purposes a defense to infringement, weighed on the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the work, the amount used, and the effect on the work's potential market.
The same section treats decompilation, reproducing and translating a computer program's code to achieve interoperability with another independently created program, as a use that may also constitute fair use. The Code has no dedicated text-and-data-mining exception; a scraper or a model trainer reproducing a copyrighted work would rely on this general fair-use standard rather than a text and data mining (TDM)-specific carve-out.
When LexLint raises it
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