Barbados

Barbados's comprehensive data-protection regime is the Data Protection Act, 2019 (Act 2019-29), closely modelled on the EU General Data Protection Regulation and enforced by the Data Protection Commissioner. The Act received the Governor-General's assent on 12 August 2019 and, by its own terms, comes into operation on a date fixed by proclamation; the Government gazetted that proclamation, S.I. 2021 No. 24, on 26 March 2021.

The Act covers processing of personal data by a data controller or data processor established in Barbados, or targeting data subjects in Barbados, without a general carve-out for publicly accessible personal data; only data a controller is itself obliged by another enactment to publish is exempt.

Biometric and genetic data are included in the Act's definition of sensitive personal data, whose processing is prohibited unless a specific ground applies, and an individual who suffers damage or distress from a contravention has a private right to compensation.

Barbados has no scraping-specific statute, so general law governs each dimension separately.

The Computer Misuse Act, Cap. 124B criminalises gaining access to a computer system knowingly or recklessly and without lawful excuse or justification; unlike some Caribbean neighbours' computer-misuse statutes, section 4 does not require defeating a security measure, but the Act separately defines access as unauthorised only where the person is not entitled to it or lacks permission, so whether reading a public, unauthenticated page (which the site operator has made available to any visitor) falls within the offence is a genuine textual question no reported Barbadian case has answered.

No Barbadian court has ruled on the enforceability of a browsewrap or clickwrap terms-of-service against a scraper. The Copyright Act, Cap. 300 permits fair dealing for research or private study and, separately, for criticism, review, or reporting current events with sufficient acknowledgment, but Barbados has not enacted a text-and-data-mining exception, so training a model on scraped copyrighted text rests only on the research-or-private-study ground if it can be so characterised.

The Copyright Act protects a compilation only as a literary work under ordinary copyright, conferring no sui generis database right.

The Data Protection Act, 2019 applies to personal data without a general carve-out for information that is publicly accessible, so scraping personal data from a public Barbadian website remains subject to the Act's lawful-basis, purpose-limitation, and cross-border-transfer duties, and biometric data scraped from public images is sensitive personal data whose processing is prohibited absent a specific ground.

No Barbadian statute or reported case establishes a scraping-specific unfair-competition, misappropriation, or trespass doctrine, and none assigns legal weight to a robots.txt directive or imposes an AI-training-specific rule.

Barbados has no press-publisher neighbouring right, no mandatory platform-to-publisher bargaining code, no recognised hot-news misappropriation doctrine distinct from ordinary copyright law, and no located statute or case law addressing hyperlinking or framing liability specifically; each of those dimensions is a sourced absence rather than an unresolved question.

Unlike some Francophone copyright statutes in the region, the Copyright Act, Cap. 300 contains no provision excluding the news of the day or mere facts from protection, and no general quotation exception letting one work reproduce extracts of another.

The only exception reaching a news aggregator's reproduction of headlines and snippets is section 52(1)(b), which excuses fair dealing with a protected work, other than a photograph, for the purpose of reporting current events, if accompanied by sufficient acknowledgment, subject to the section 53 fairness factors.

That exception carries no headline-length or short-extract cap and is not confined to the press industry, and no reported Barbadian decision applies it to a systematic aggregator as opposed to a traditional news report. The Act predates the concept of a machine-readable text-and-data-mining reservation, so no opt-out mechanism of that kind exists either.