Copyright Act, 2003, fair dealing and compilation copyright

Copyright Act 2003 (Act No. 21 of 2003), ss. 2, 5, 50-52 (literary work, protected works, research/private study, criticism/review/reporting, determining fair dealing)

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In force since 30 November 2004.

A copyright and text and data mining (TDM) rule binding public and private bodies.

As of 6 September 2026.

What it requires

Where relying on fair dealing to reproduce a Vincentian literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work at scale for research or model training, confine the use to the research-or-private-study or criticism-review-reporting grounds, give a sufficient acknowledgement except when reporting current events, and weigh the four fairness factors in section 52, since the Act has no text-and-data-mining exception for scraping-derived training data.
Do not treat a written table or compilation as free of copyright merely because it is a compilation of data; it is protected like any other literary work only where it is original, and the Act confers no sui generis right over the underlying data itself.

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 50 permits fair dealing with a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work for the purposes of research or private study without infringing copyright, subject to section 52's four-factor fairness test. Section 51 permits fair dealing for criticism or review of a work or a performance, and a separate fair-dealing ground for reporting current events using a protected work other than a photograph, each ground (except reporting current events) requiring a sufficient acknowledgement.

Section 52 directs a court determining whether a dealing is fair to weigh the nature of the work, the extent and substantiality of the part used, the purpose and character of the use, and the effect on the potential market for or commercial value of the work.

The Act has no express text-and-data-mining exception, so reproducing scraped Vincentian text at scale to train a model can rest only on the narrow research-or-private-study ground, whose private, non-commercial character is a poor fit for large-scale commercial training. Section 2 defines a literary work to include a written table or compilation.

Section 5(1)(a) makes copyright subsist only in an original literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work, so a compilation is protected only as an ordinary literary work conditioned on originality of its selection or arrangement. The Act confers no sui generis database right, and extracting unoriginal underlying data from a compilation falls outside copyright altogether.

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