Copyright Act, fair-use exception and absence of a text-and-data-mining exception
Copyright Act B.E. 2537 (1994), Section 32
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 21 March 1995.
A copyright and text and data mining (TDM) rule binding public and private bodies.
As of 6 September 2026.
What it requires
- Reproducing or adapting more than a normal, non-prejudicial extract of another party's copyrighted work, including to train a model, needs a Section 32 to 35 exception or a licence, because Thai copyright law has no dedicated text-and-data-mining exception for automated bulk extraction.
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 15 gives a copyright owner the exclusive right of reproduction or adaptation and of communication to the public. Section 32 paragraph one excepts an act against a copyright work that does not conflict with a normal exploitation of the work by the owner and does not unreasonably prejudice the owner's legitimate rights, the general fair-use-style ground every other exception in Part 6 sits under.
Thailand has not enacted a specific text-and-data-mining exception comparable to the EU's Articles 3-4 of Directive 2019/790, so an automated, bulk reproduction of copyrighted text for model training must be tested against this general, fact-sensitive standard rather than against a dedicated text and data mining (TDM) rule, and no reported Thai case has applied Section 32 to that fact pattern.
Section 32/2 separately excepts a reproduction that must exist for copies already lawfully acquired to run in a computer system, a technical, incidental-copy exception rather than a TDM one. The Copyright Act creates no sui generis database right.
When LexLint raises it
crawls_webtrains_models