Copyright Ordinance 1962, closed enumerated fair dealing exceptions
Copyright Ordinance 1962, s. 57 (fair dealing)
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.
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 a general fair use or text-and-data-mining exception to reproduce or train on copyrighted literary, dramatic, musical or artistic works gathered from Pakistan; section 57 of the Copyright Ordinance 1962 permits reproduction only for a closed list of purposes, none of which is text or data mining.
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 57(1) permits fair dealing for research or private study and for criticism or review, among a short, closed list of purposes that do not constitute an infringement of copyright. That same closed list separately permits fair dealing for reporting current events, but only in a newspaper, magazine or similar periodical, or by broadcast, in a cinematographic work, or by means of photographs.
The rest of the list covers reproduction for a judicial proceeding, publication of a report of a political address, a certified copy made under another law, public reading of a reasonable extract, and reproduction of short passages in an educational, non-copyright collection.
The list is closed and does not include text-and-data-mining, machine learning, or any computer-based analysis of a work's text or data, so section 57 gives no statutory ground for training a model on scraped copyrighted text. Copyright infringement outside these exceptions is punishable under section 66 with imprisonment up to three years or a fine up to Rs 100,000, or both. Section 1(3) defers the Ordinance's own commencement to a later Gazette notification not reproduced in the text read.
When LexLint raises it
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