Uganda

The Act establishes a personal data protection office within the National Information Technology Authority - Uganda (the Authority) to enforce data-protection principles requiring accountable, fair, lawful, adequate and transparent collection and processing of personal data.

A person must not collect or process personal data without the data subject's prior consent unless a specific ground applies, such as a public duty, national security, a contract with the data subject, or a legal obligation, and a child's personal data additionally needs the consent of the child's parent or guardian.

Special personal data (religious or philosophical belief, political opinion, sexual life, financial information, or health status) may not be collected or processed outside narrow grounds such as an employer's legal duty or the data subject's free consent; the list does not name biometric or genetic data.

A data controller must give a data subject notice before collecting their data, retain it no longer than necessary, secure it against unauthorised access, and notify the Authority immediately of any unauthorised access or acquisition of personal data, with the Authority deciding whether the affected data subject must also be told.

A data subject may access, correct or object to processing of their own data, stop processing for direct marketing, and require that a decision producing legal or similarly significant effects not be based solely on automated processing. Transferring or storing personal data outside Uganda requires either that the destination country's protection be at least equivalent to the Act's or the data subject's consent.

A data controller must register with the Authority, and unlawfully obtaining, disclosing, destroying, altering or selling personal data is an offence carrying a fine of 240 to 245 currency points (UGX 4,800,000 to UGX 4,900,000 at UGX 20,000 per currency point) or imprisonment of up to ten years, or both; a convicted corporation may additionally be fined up to two percent of its annual gross turnover.

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.

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.