Dominican Republic

Article 1 sets the law's object as the comprehensive protection of personal data held in public or private files, registers, or databases, and separately regulates the constitution and operation of Sociedades de Información Crediticia (credit-reporting bureaus, SIC).

The law defines sensitive data as data revealing political opinions, religious or philosophical convictions, union affiliation, or health or sex-life information, and article 75 bars forming a file that reveals such data without the person's free, conscious, and voluntary consent.

Article 80 restricts international transfer of personal data to cases where the data subject freely authorizes the transfer or a specific statutory ground applies, such as medical exchange for treatment or epidemiological research, or banking and securities transactions.

Article 88 sanctions any violation of the law with six months to two years of correctional imprisonment and a fine of 100 to 150 times the minimum wage, and article 84 separately fines specific falsification and unauthorized-access conduct while expressly preserving the person's right to recover civil damages for the violation of their privacy right under ordinary civil-law rules.

The Superintendencia de Bancos inspects and supervises credit-reporting files kept by Sociedades de Información Crediticia under articles 36 and 79 through 82, but the law creates no dedicated data-protection authority with jurisdiction over personal-data processing generally, and no breach-notification duty is imposed.

Article 6 (Acceso Ilícito) sanctions accessing an electronic, computer, telematic, or telecommunications system or its components, whether or not using another's identity, or exceeding an authorization, with three months to one year of imprisonment and a fine of one to two hundred times the minimum wage; a first paragraph raises the penalty to one to three years of imprisonment and a fine of two to four hundred times the minimum wage where the illicit access suppresses or modifies data, or discloses confidential data found in the accessed system, and a second paragraph imposes that same one-to-three-year, two-to-four-hundred-times range on exploiting access obtained coincidentally or unintentionally.

Article 5 (Códigos de Acceso) separately sanctions divulging, generating, copying, capturing, using, altering, trafficking, or decoding an access code or similar mechanism used to achieve illicit access, or falsifying an access device, with one to three years of imprisonment and a fine of twenty to one hundred times the minimum wage; a separate paragraph on cloning an access device for resale, distribution, or fraudulent financial transactions raises this to one to ten years of imprisonment and a fine of two to five hundred times the minimum wage, the most severe tier either article carries.

Neither article's text turns on defeating a technical security measure, so a scraper's authorization status, rather than the presence of a technical barrier, is what the statute conditions liability on; no reported Dominican decision applying either article to a scraper reading public pages was located.

Article 30 requires the copyright law's limitations and exceptions to be read restrictively, so as not to conflict with the work's normal exploitation or unjustifiably prejudice the rights holder. Article 31 permits quoting an author by transcribing necessary passages, provided they are not so extensive as to amount to a simulated and substantial reproduction of the work, with the author's name and the work's title cited.

Article 32 permits reprographic reproduction, for teaching or examinations at educational institutions, of lawfully published newspaper or periodical articles or short excerpts of lawfully published works, where the use is not for sale or profit.

Article 2(12) protects a compilation or database's creative selection or arrangement as a literary work, but the same clause expressly withholds that protection from the underlying data or materials themselves, so Dominican law confers a compilation-copyright model rather than a sui generis database right.

Article 34 makes lawful the reproduction, distribution, and communication to the public of the news of the day, or other information about newsworthy facts and events, once they have already been publicly disseminated by the press or by broadcasting; a paragraph extends this to reproducing and making available, in connection with reporting on a current event, works seen or heard in the course of that event, to the extent justified by the informational purpose.

Article 33 permits reproducing any article, photograph, illustration, or commentary about current events published by the press or broadcast on radio or television, unless expressly prohibited by the rights holder.

Article 35 permits publishing, as current news and without authorization, speeches delivered in deliberative assemblies, judicial debates, or before public authorities, and public conferences, speeches, or sermons whose rights have not been expressly reserved, though such works may not be published in a separate collection without the author's authorization.