Law / Namibia

Namibia

2 of 8 named instruments researched to a stage, across two of the six areas of law we track: 2 in force. As of 7 September 2026.

AI law none researched
Privacy law none researched
Scraping law 1
Cybersecurity law none researched
Age gating law none researched
News aggregation law 1

in forceenacted but not yet in forceproposedrepealed, withdrawn or blocked

Drafted with AI from the cited sources under the direction of UnGovr staff. UnGovr holds editorial responsibility for this page.

Scraping law1 instrument, 1 in force

Research summary (227 words)

Namibia has no scraping-specific statute, so general law governs each dimension separately. The Electronic Transactions Act 4 of 2019 carries no general unauthorised-access offence reaching a public, unauthenticated page; its narrow offences reach a Council member's or an accredited security tester's breach of confidentiality and a false accreditation claim, and a Cybercrime Bill that would add a general computer-misuse offence remains under development and unenacted.

No reported Namibian case addresses the enforceability of a browsewrap or clickwrap terms of service against a scraper.

The Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Protection Act 6 of 1994 permits fair dealing for research, private study, criticism, review, or reporting a current event, but enacts no text-and-data-mining exception or machine-readable opt-out mechanism; its definition of "literary work" extends to "tables and compilations," so a database is protected only as a compilation-type literary work rather than through a separate sui generis database right.

Personal-data reach over scraped public personal data is governed by the sectoral provisions researched under the privacy topic, which finds no comprehensive personal-data statute in force. The Act's savings clause preserves any common-law rule on unlawful competition alongside the statute, so an unfair-competition or passing-off claim over scraped content is not foreclosed in principle, but no reported Namibian case applies it to scraping.

No Namibian statute or reported case assigns legal weight to a robots.txt directive or states an AI-training-specific rule.

Copyright and text and data mining (TDM)

Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Protection Act 6 of 1994, Fair Dealing and Compilation Protection

Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Protection Act 6 of 1994, ss. 2, 15-16Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Protection Act 6 of 1994, official text reproduced in the Legal Assistance Centre's Annotated Statutes

In force since 15 March 1996. Binds public and private bodies.

What this law does

Section 15(1)(a) excuses fair dealing in the use of a literary or musical work for the purpose of research or private study, or the personal or private use, of the person using the work. Section 15(1)(c) separately excuses fair dealing for the purpose of reporting on a current event in a newspaper, magazine or similar periodical, or by means of broadcasting or in a cinematograph film.

Section 16 permits a further reproduction of a work in circumstances to be prescribed, provided the reproduction does not conflict with a normal exploitation of the work and is not unreasonably prejudicial to the owner's legitimate interests, echoing the same three-step structure without creating a text-and-data-mining-specific exception or a machine-readable reservation mechanism.

Section 2 defines "literary work" to include "tables and compilations," so a database or dataset is protected, if at all, as a compilation-type literary work rather than under a separate sui generis database right; a computer program is expressly excluded from that definition and is instead a distinct category of protected work under section 14.

What it requires

News aggregation law1 instrument, 1 in force

Research summary (240 words)

Namibia has no press-publisher neighbouring right and no mandatory platform-to-publisher bargaining code; the Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Protection Act 6 of 1994 is the only enacted law reaching an aggregator's reproduction of news content.

Section 15(7) lets a newspaper, magazine, or similar periodical, or a broadcast, reproduce an article on a current economic, political, or religious topic without the author's authorisation, provided the right of reproduction has not been expressly reserved when the article was first published and the source is clearly mentioned in the reproduction; section 15(8) provides that no copyright subsists in publications or broadcasts of news of the day.

The Act's neighbouring-rights part (sections 46-54) protects only performers, not a print or online news publisher, and its categories of copyright in broadcasts, programme-carrying signals, and published editions (sections 10-13) are ordinary copyright subject matter rather than a publisher-side neighbouring right of the kind the European Union's Digital Single Market Directive Article 15 creates, so no press-publisher right exists.

The Act's savings clause preserves any common-law rule on unlawful competition alongside the statute, which leaves a hot-news misappropriation theory available in principle, but no reported Namibian case applies it to systematic news aggregation.

No statute or reported case addresses whether a hyperlink is a communication to the public or whether framing or inline display changes the answer, and the Act enacts no text-and-data-mining exception or machine-readable opt-out mechanism that would bear on an aggregator's indexing of news content.

Snippet reproduction

Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Protection Act 6 of 1994, News Reporting and Quotation Exceptions

Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Protection Act 6 of 1994, s. 15(6)-(8)Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Protection Act 6 of 1994, official text reproduced in the Legal Assistance Centre's Annotated Statutes

In force since 15 March 1996. Binds public and private bodies.

What this law does

Section 15(6) provides that the copyright in a lecture, address, or other work of a similar nature delivered in public is not infringed by its reproduction in the press or its communication in a broadcast, made for an informatory purpose.

Section 15(7) provides that the copyright in an article published in a newspaper, magazine, or similar periodical, or in a broadcast, on a current economic, political, or religious topic, is not infringed by its reproduction in the press or its communication in a broadcast, unless such reproduction or communication was expressly reserved when the article was first published or the work was broadcast, provided the source is clearly mentioned in the reproduction or communication.

Section 15(8) provides that no copyright subsists in the official text of a legislative, administrative, or legal work, a political speech or one delivered in judicial proceedings, or publications or broadcasts of news of the day, though the author of a political speech retains the exclusive right to publish a collection of such speeches.

Note and primary source

This page covers the instruments LexLint has researched to a stage. Instruments named in the corpus but not yet researched are counted in the head and are not listed here. Every entry carries its own primary source on its note page. This is a research index, not legal advice.