Law / Saudi Arabia

Copyright Law, exceptions article and absence of a text-and-data-mining exception

Royal Decree No. M/41, Art. 15 exceptions, no text-and-data-mining exception (2 Rajab 1424H, 30 August 2003)

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 the Copyright Law's Article 15 exceptions (personal use, quotation, education, and similar narrow uses) to reproduce a Saudi-copyrighted work for training an AI or machine-learning model; none of them reaches that 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.

Article 15 lists eleven enumerated uses of a copyrighted work that are lawful without the copyright owner's permission. The first of them is personal use, excluding computer software and audio-visual works; others include quotation with attribution and educational use.

None of the eleven reaches reproduction for training an AI or machine-learning model, and no text-and-data-mining opt-out or opt-in mechanism was found elsewhere in the sections located, so training a model on scraped Saudi-copyrighted text rests on none of the Law's own exceptions.

When LexLint raises it

  • crawls_web
  • trains_models

Read the law

official Copyright Law text, WIPO Lex consolidated version

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