Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Act, 2006, fair use
Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Act, 2006, s. 15 (fair use)
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 4 August 2006.
A copyright and text and data mining (TDM) rule binding public and private bodies.
As of 5 September 2026.
What it requires
- A quotation from a published work, including a press summary, is not an infringement where it is compatible with fair practice, no more extensive than the purpose justifies, and credits the source work.
- Reproducing an enactment, a court decision, a government inquiry report, or the news of the day (fresh reports of current events, including from the internet) does not infringe copyright, because these are excluded from protection outright.
- There is no text-and-data-mining exception and no database right in Uganda: training on or extracting from a compiled dataset of copyrighted works rests only on the general fair-use grounds in section 15, if it can be characterised as one of them.
If you get it wrong
Criminal exposureYes
Criminal exposure note
Unauthorised publication, distribution, reproduction, public performance, broadcast, or communication of a protected work to the public is an offence carrying a fine of up to 100 currency points (UGX 2,000,000) or imprisonment of up to four years, or both (s. 47(1)).
Penalty structure
Fine only under section 47(1); the same subsection also allows imprisonment of up to four years instead of or in addition to the fine.
- Rule
- Fixed only
- As of
- 5 September 2026
- Currency
- UGX
- Fixed cap
- 2,000,000
What it reaches
Obligation class
TDM
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 permits the fair use of a protected work, without the copyright owner's consent, for private personal use, for a quotation from a published work (including a newspaper or periodical press summary) that is compatible with fair practice and acknowledges its source, for teaching purposes to the extent justified by way of illustration, and for use compatible with fair practice in reporting current events.
Section 6 excludes ideas, concepts, procedures and methods from copyright protection outright, and section 7 excludes an enactment, a court decision, a government inquiry report, and the news of the day (reports of fresh events or current information by the media, whether published in written form, broadcast, on the internet, or by any other means) from copyright protection, holding the Government as trustee of those works for the public benefit.
The Act contains no text-and-data-mining exception and confers no sui generis database right; a compilation is protected, if at all, only as an ordinary literary work under section 5, and Uganda's related (neighbouring) rights cover only performances, sound recordings, broadcasts and programme-carrying signals.
Unauthorised publication, distribution, reproduction, public performance, broadcast, or communication of a protected work to the public is an offence carrying a fine of up to 100 currency points (UGX 2,000,000) or imprisonment of up to four years, or both.
When LexLint raises it
crawls_webtrains_models
Read the law
official Act text as published by WIPO Lex, WIPO's own legislative database