May Bosnian legal text be republished?

The provision

Zakon o autorskom pravu i srodnim pravima u Bosni i Hercegovini, Službeni glasnik BiH 63/10, Article 8, headed Nezaštićene tvorevine - unprotected creations:

Official texts from legislation, administration and justice - laws, regulations, decisions, reports, minutes, court decisions and the like - are outside the act. Not licensed, not excepted, not fair dealing. Outside.

The database right, which is the real constraint

The same act protects the person who assembles a collection.

Article 143 gives the maker of a database the exclusive right to reproduce it, distribute it and make it available to the public. Article 146 sets the term at fifteen years, and then:

A substantial update restarts the clock. A commercial legal database that keeps adding gazette issues holds a right that in practice never expires - over a collection whose individual documents are themselves unprotected.

Two more things Article 8 does not reach

An unofficial consolidated text. Article 8(1)(b) names laws, regulations, decisions, reports, minutes and court decisions. A consolidation prepared by a publisher is none of those; it is editorial work, and Article 7 protects a collection whose selection or arrangement is an original creation. Brčko District is the exception: there the Assembly establishes the consolidated text and publishes it in the gazette, which makes it an official text.

A translation.

A translation of an official text is protected unless it was itself published as an official text. In a state with three official languages and a great deal of donor-funded translation, that is not a marginal case.

Conclusion

Three rules, and they decide the design of any corpus built here:

1. Copying the text of an act is permitted, because official texts are outside copyright.
2. Copying somebody's collection of acts is not, because the database maker's right reaches the collection even where every document in it is free.
3. A consolidated text and a translation are somebody's work unless the state published them as official texts.

So a corpus is built one provision at a time, by people who read the gazette issue and enter what it says, with their name and the date on the entry. That is slower than a crawler, and it is the route the database right does not reach.

This is a reading of a statute that was fetched, quoted verbatim and cited. It is not legal advice, and no lawyer has checked it. Read the source before relying on it.

Sources

Every source below was retrieved on the date shown. A source read in March and the same source read in September are not necessarily the same document.

1. Zakon o autorskom pravu i srodnim pravima u Bosni i Hercegovini, Službeni glasnik BiH 63/10Retrieved 15 September 2026Copy hosted by WIPO Lex
2. Zakon o autorskom pravu i srodnim pravima u Bosni i Hercegovini, Službeni glasnik BiH 63/10, Croatian-language textRetrieved 15 September 2026Copy hosted by the University of Sarajevo; text extracted locally from the PDF and Articles 8, 143 and 146 quoted from that extraction
3. Institut za intelektualno vlasništvo BiH, archived copy of the same lawRetrieved 15 September 2026Fetched; the PDF did not extract to readable text locally, so nothing here is quoted from it. Recorded because it is the state institute's own copy and the most authoritative host found

Corrections

This article was changed after publication. It keeps its address and its identity; what follows is what changed and when.

• 16 September 2026Added an orientation line at the top naming the question this article answers, and pointed it at the question box at /labs/ask, which did not exist when this was written. No claim, source, date or commitment was changed, added or removed.
• 15 September 2026Retitled from "The question that decides everything has an answer", which named an earlier framing rather than the subject. Rewritten. The note opened by quoting the earlier blocker and setting it aside; it now states the finding first and keeps the reasoning in one direction. No provision, quotation, citation or conclusion was changed.