Coming Up in Singapore: New Copyright Exception for Text and Data Mining - Lexology

"The Singapore Copyright Act is undergoing a major overhaul. Following an extensive public consultation exercise which began in 2016, the proposed amendments were passed by Parliament on 13 September 2021 and are expected to be enacted into law in November 2021. Amongst the key changes is the introduction of a new exception to copyright infringement for use of works for text and data mining (TDM). This exception will significantly increase the availability of data for TDM, as well as training data for artificial intelligence (AI) programmes. This article discusses the scope of the exception and its limitations and conditions, and what these mean in practice.

Singapore - The (soon-to-be new) kid on the block Text and data mining (TDM) is generally defined as the automated analysis of large amounts of data to discover patterns, trends and other useful information.

Whilst and data do not enjoy copyright protection so that no copyright licence is required to use facts and data per se, the process of TDM may involve the doing of acts which are restricted by copyright. For instance, the making of copies of works for the purpose of extracting the relevant facts and data from the work. In the absence of an exception, the doing of these acts without the copyright owner’s authorisation could amount to infringement.

A number of jurisdictions have introduced specific exceptions for TDM in their copyright legislation, including Japan, and the United Kingdom and, most recently, the EU (as part of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market) (DSM Directive) with EU Member States being required to implement the rules into their national laws by early June 2021. Singapore will be the newest kid on the block when its TDM exception is introduced in November this year...."