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Copyright Protection and Digital Works in UAE Law
How does UAE law protect copyright and digital works?
1. Works Covered by Protection
The Decree-Law grants protection to authors of works and to holders of neighboring rights where their rights are infringed within the State. Protected works include, in particular: books, pamphlets, articles and other written works; smart applications, computer programs and their applications, databases and similar works specified by ministerial decision; lectures, speeches and sermons, whether oral or written; and dramatic and musical works. Digital content thus falls expressly within the scope of legal protection.
2. What is Not Covered by Protection?
Protection does not extend to ideas, procedures, methods of operation, mathematical concepts, principles and abstract facts; rather, it attaches to the original expression of them. Nor does it cover official documents such as the texts of laws, regulations, decisions, international agreements and judicial rulings, nor news and reports of current events that are merely informational, nor works that have entered the public domain. However, compilations of such documents and news are protected where their selection, arrangement or the effort therein is original.
3. The Author's Rights: Moral and Economic
The author enjoys two kinds of rights. Moral rights relate to the author's person, to the attribution of the work and to preventing its distortion or mutilation; they are perpetual, inalienable and not subject to prescription. Economic rights entitle the author alone — or his successor — to license the exploitation of the work in any manner.
The economic right of exploitation expressly includes reproduction, including electronic downloading or storage; broadcasting and rebroadcasting; performance and communication to the public; translation, adaptation, rental and lending; and publication by any means, including making the work available through computers and information and communication networks. Accordingly, any uploading or sharing of a protected digital work without the written authorization of the right holder falls under the law.
4. Protection in the Digital Environment
The legislator has dedicated provisions to digital works that keep pace with their nature. Licensing the economic rights of smart-application and computer-software works is subject to special provisions in the Decree-Law. Protection further extends to criminalizing the circumvention of technical protection measures and tampering with the electronic information by which right holders manage their works. Loading or storing on a computer any copy of computer programs, their applications or databases without a license from the author or right holder is a criminalized act in itself.
“The digital work is not an exception to the law but at its very core; whoever copies a program or makes protected content available over the network without written permission commits a punishable offense, and whoever documents his right early spares himself a long dispute.”
5. Duration of Protection
The economic rights of the author are protected for his lifetime and for 50 years beginning from the start of the calendar year following the year of his death. For joint works, the term is calculated from the death of the last surviving author. Works of applied art are protected for 25 years from the start of the year following their publication, and the economic rights of performers are protected for 50 years. Upon the expiry of these terms the work enters the public domain, while moral rights remain perpetual and not subject to prescription.
6. Infringement and Penalties
The law imposes criminal penalties for the infringement of copyright and neighboring rights, without prejudice to any more severe penalty stipulated by any other law, as follows:
7. Enforcement and Compensation
Alongside the criminal penalty, the author or right holder is entitled to claim compensation for the infringement of his moral and economic rights in accordance with the general rules. The judge for urgent matters may — upon a petition — order the suspension of the publication, display or making of the work, and the attachment of the original copy or its copies and the materials used in reproducing it. The law has also created a committee competent to consider disputes and grievances relating to copyright before resorting to the court, with the possibility of appealing its decisions before the State courts.
- Federal Decree-Law No. 38 of 2021 on Copyright and Neighboring Rights (in force from 2 January 2022; repealing Federal Law No. 7 of 2002).
- Article 2: Works covered by protection, including smart applications, computer software and databases.
- Article 3: Works and facts not covered by protection.
- Article 7: The author's right to the economic exploitation of the work.
- Article 12: Licensing the economic rights of smart-application and computer-software works.
- Article 39: Penalty for infringing moral and economic rights.
- Article 40: Penalty for technical circumvention and unlicensed copying and storage.
