Sao Tome and Principe

Lei n.º 03/2016 sets São Tomé and Príncipe's general rules for processing personal data by automated or manual means, applying to a controller established in the country, one targeting activities there, one using means located there, or one whose processing engages São Toméan private or public international law.

Processing needs the holder's unequivocal authorization or one of the Law's specific grounds: contract performance, a legal obligation, the holder's vital interests, a public-interest mission, or the controller's own legitimate interest balanced against the holder's rights.

A narrower list of sensitive categories, philosophical or political belief, trade-union or religious affiliation, racial or ethnic origin, private life, health or sex life including genetic data, needs the holder's explicit authorization, a specific legal provision, or NAPPD authorization for an important public interest; biometric identifiers as such are not named among these categories.

A controller or its representative must notify the National Agency for the Protection of Personal Data (NAPPD) in writing at least eight days before starting a wholly or partly automated processing operation, and obtain NAPPD's prior authorization before processing sensitive data, credit or solvency data, interconnecting personal-data files, or repurposing data collected for another end.

Chapter III gives the data holder a right to information at collection and a right of access and rectification. A transfer of personal data outside the country needs the destination legal order to ensure an adequate level of protection, as NAPPD assesses it, unless a derogation applies (contract necessity, an important public interest, the holder's vital interests, or a public register open to consultation) or NAPPD authorizes the transfer on the strength of adequate contractual safeguards. The Law's own final provision defers its entry into force to general law without stating a day.

Article 75(1) excludes from the reproduction right a temporary act of reproduction that is transient or accessory, is an integral and essential part of a technological process, and whose sole purpose is to enable a network transmission between third parties by an intermediary or a lawful use with no independent economic significance; browsing and temporary storage that enable a transmission system's effective functioning are lawful on the same terms, provided the intermediary does not modify the transmission's content or interfere with a technology's lawful use as recognized by market practice.

Article 75(2) permits, without the author's consent, a regular selection of periodical press articles as a press review. It also permits the fixation or communication of short excerpts from a work when their use in reporting a current event is justified for information purposes. It further permits inserting citations or summaries of another's work in support of one's own views or for criticism, discussion, or teaching.

It also permits reproducing or communicating an already-accessible current-affairs article on an economic, political, or religious topic, unless its reproduction right has been expressly reserved. Article 76 conditions this free use on naming the author and publisher where possible, and on paying equitable remuneration to the author and publisher in the cases the article specifies.

No text-and-data-mining-specific exception, and no AI-training-specific rule, is stated separately from this general free-use framework, and the Code predates that concept. Infringing outside these exceptions is punished under article 197.

Article 3(1)(b) protects summaries and compilations of works, whether protected or not, such as collections, encyclopaedias, and anthologies, as original works only where the choice or arrangement of their contents constitutes an intellectual creation, and article 3(1)(c) extends the same standard to systematic or annotated compilations of official texts (conventions, laws, regulations, and administrative or judicial decisions).

The Code names no database as such and creates no separate sui generis right in an unoriginal, purely factual collection of data, so a compilation that is not itself an original creation is not protected against reproduction under this article. Article 7(1)(a) additionally excludes news of the day and reports of various events disclosed merely as simple information from copyright protection altogether, whatever their protected status otherwise.

Infringing a protected compilation is punished under the Code's own penalty provisions (article 197), which punish, with the same terms, unauthorized use of a counterfeit or usurped work under article 199. Article 229 puts the Code into force on the date of its publication, which the Diário da República issue carrying it dates to 17 April 2017.

Article 7(1)(a) excludes news of the day and reports of various events disclosed as simple information from copyright protection altogether, so a purely factual news item carries no copyright to begin with. For material that is protected, article 75(2)(c) permits, without the author's consent, a regular selection of periodical press articles in the form of a press review.

Article 75(2)(d) permits fixing, reproducing, or communicating short excerpts of a work when their use in reporting a current event is justified for information purposes. Article 75(2)(g) permits inserting citations or summaries of another's work in support of one's own views or for criticism, discussion, or teaching.

Article 75(2)(l) permits reproducing or communicating an already-accessible current-affairs article on an economic, political, or religious topic, or a broadcast work or material of like character, unless its reproduction or broadcast right has been expressly reserved. Article 76 conditions this free use on naming the author and publisher where possible and, for some of these uses, paying equitable remuneration.

None of these provisions states a length limit or a headline-only threshold, and no reported São Toméan decision testing whether a systematic aggregator's reproduction of headlines and snippets, as distinct from a traditional press review, falls within either exception has been located.

São Tomé and Príncipe has no separate press-publisher neighbouring right, no compelled platform-to-publisher bargaining regime, no recognized hot-news or misappropriation doctrine distinct from ordinary copyright law, and no case law on hyperlinking or framed display has been located.

Article 3(1)(b) protects a compilation as a copyright work only where its selection or arrangement of contents is itself an original creation, and the Code creates no sui generis database right and no text-and-data-mining exception or machine-readable opt-out mechanism. Article 229 puts the Code into force on the date of its publication, which the Diário da República issue carrying it dates to 17 April 2017.