Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Act, 2006, news exception and quotation

Section 7(1)(d) excludes the news of the day, meaning 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 outright, and section 7(2) makes the Government trustee of the excluded works for the public benefit: a bare news report is never a protected work under Ugandan law, whichever outlet reports it first.

Section 15(1)(b) separately lets any person, without the copyright owner's consent, quote a published work, including a quotation from a newspaper or periodical in the form of a press summary, where the quotation is compatible with fair practice, its extent does not exceed what is justified for the purpose of the work using it, and the source is acknowledged.

Neither provision is capped at a headline-length or short-extract threshold beyond fair practice and the quoting work's own purpose, and whether either reaches a systematic aggregator's reproduction of headlines and snippets, as opposed to a traditional press summary, has not been tested in a reported Ugandan decision.

Uganda has no separate press-publisher neighbouring right, no compelled platform-to-publisher bargaining regime, no recognised hot-news or misappropriation doctrine distinct from ordinary copyright and unfair-competition law, and no located case law on hyperlinking or framed display.