Law / Saudi Arabia

Copyright Law, database compilations and absence of a sui generis right

Royal Decree No. M/41, Art. 3(5) database compilations, no sui generis right (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 database right rule binding public and private bodies.

As of 6 September 2026.

What it requires

  • Do not assume a merely comprehensive, non-creatively-arranged Saudi database is protected; only a database that is creative as to the selection or arrangement of its contents is a protected derived work under the Copyright Law, and only that creative selection or arrangement, not the underlying data, is protected.

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 3(5) protects a database, whether mechanically readable or readable in any other manner, as a derived work only where it is creative as to the selection or arrangement of its contents, the same creativity-based standard the article applies to encyclopedias, anthologies, and folklore compilations.

No separate sui generis or producer's database right, of the kind the European Union's Database Directive creates, was found in the sections located; a non-creative, merely comprehensive database compiled by a scraper's target falls outside this protection.

When LexLint raises it

  • crawls_web
  • trains_models

Read the law

official Copyright Law text, WIPO Lex consolidated version

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