Similar to the copyright laws of other Gulf states, the Omani copyright law adopts the exhaustive closed list system for copyright exceptions. This means that for a use of a protected work not to be considered an infringement, that use must fall under an explicitly stated exception under the copyright law. The fact that a use is personal, non-commercial, or accompanied by proper attribution, on its own, is not sufficient to protect the use against claims of copyright infringement. This is different from copyright laws that adopt a flexible copyright exception system, such as ‘fair use’ in the USA, where any use may be permitted, even if not explicitly mentioned in the law, as long as the use can be considered ‘fair’.
Copyright laws that adopt a flexible copyright exception, such as the US copyright law, are capable of enabling new innovative uses of technology without the need for the actual law to be amended, whereas copyright laws that adopted a closet list of exceptions, such as the Omani copyright law, are usually incapable of accommodating for new technological uses without amending the law.
An example of such a new technological use is the practice of ‘text and data mining’ – a research method that uses computer software to analyse massive amounts of data to look for interesting trends. As an illustration, text and data mining can examine thousands of medical records to identify links between certain symptoms and diseases in a way that cannot be done by a human individual. Similarly, such method can be used in the study of law to electronically analyse massive amounts of court decisions to identify trends and connections between different legal key terms. Due to the way text and data mining works, the computer software making the analysis must copy the data, at least temporarily. Because the Omani copyright law does not have an exception to permit copying in this specific case, text and data mining is considered an activity that violates copyright law if the permission of the author is not acquired. It is not practically possible to acquire permission for many text and data mining cases because the data is extremely massive in size and there is no way for the researcher to go and seek the permission of every single author of such data. If the data examined is public data on the internet, such as tweets or other user generated content, it might not be possible to even identify the author of the work.
This would not have been the case had the Omani copyright law adopted a flexible copyright exception like fair use. Under such a system, it would be possible to argue that text and data mining is permitted as long as the use satisfies the conditions for fair use. This does not only mean that legislators in countries like the USA do not have to waste their time amending the copyright law every time a new technology comes out, but this also makes the USA a much more attractive environment for the adoption of new technologies, such as text and data mining for research, because their law is flexible enough to permit it.
The copyright exceptions currently offered by the Omani copyright law are inadequate and do not satisfy some of the most basic needs of users in the country (we are the only country in the GCC that does not have a private use exception). Oman needs to have a text and data mining to enable the use of this method by researchers in the country. Oman should also reconsider the general way in which it implements exceptions under the copyright law and must seriously take into consideration the needs of the members of society when determining this issue.
