Grenada

The Data Protection Act, No. 1 of 2023 requires a data user to have the data subject's consent, or one of a limited set of alternative lawful grounds, before processing personal data, and to process sensitive personal data (including health, genetic, biometric, sex-life, political, religious and criminal-record information) only on narrower grounds such as the data subject's written consent.

It requires notice to the data subject of the purpose and source of collection, and bars disclosure for a new purpose or to a new class of recipient without consent. It also requires practical security measures, retention no longer than necessary, and data-subject rights of access and rectification, enforced by an Information Commission the Act establishes. A data subject who suffers damage from a contravention of the Act by a public or private body may bring civil proceedings in the High Court.

Section 1(2) delays the Act's commencement to a day the Minister appoints by Order in the Gazette, and no commencement Order has been located, so the Act has been assented and gazetted but is not yet in force.

Section 5(1) prohibits a person from, knowingly and without lawful excuse, justification or the permission of the owner or person in charge of an electronic system or network, gaining access to it, or downloading, copying or extracting data, an electronic database or information from it.

Unlike a computer-misuse offence conditioned on defeating a technical security measure, section 5's chapeau turns on the absence of permission from the person in charge of the system, a standard that on its face can reach a scraper that accesses or extracts data from a public, unauthenticated page without the site operator's permission; no reported Grenadian case has tested the provision against that fact pattern.

The offence carries a fine of up to two hundred thousand dollars or imprisonment of up to three years, or both, on summary conviction. The Act was approved in 2013 and, per Council of Europe reporting, amended by Act No. 10 of 2014 (which repealed three unrelated sections, 6, 16 and 25) and came into effect in 2016; no source located states the day-precise commencement date.

Section 10 permits, without the copyright owner's authorisation, the reproduction of a short part of a published work as a quotation, provided the reproduction is compatible with fair dealing, does not exceed the extent justified by the purpose, and is accompanied by an indication of the source and the author's name.

Section 13 permits a narrower exception for temporary reproduction made in the process of transmitting a work or making a stored work perceptible, where the person doing so is entitled to do the act by authorisation of the copyright owner or by operation of law, so it does not itself authorise unauthorised bulk collection.

The Act has no express text-and-data-mining exception, so large-scale reproduction of copyright-protected Grenadian works for model training rests only on the fair-dealing quotation ground, whose short-extract and source-attribution conditions are a poor fit for that use.

Section 6(1)(b) protects a collection of data (a database) as a derivative work only where the collection is original by reason of the selection, co-ordination or arrangement of its contents, a compilation-copyright standard rather than a sui generis database right of the kind some other jurisdictions confer.

Criminal liability for infringement (s. 43) attaches only where the infringement is for profit-making purposes and the infringer knew or had reason to believe it was an infringement, punishable on summary conviction by a fine not exceeding fifty thousand dollars and imprisonment not exceeding five years.

Section 61 delays the Act's commencement to a day the Minister appoints by Order in the Gazette; WIPO Lex lists the Act as the current version of Grenada's copyright statute without stating a commencement date, and no dated commencement Order has been located.

The Data Protection Act, No. 1 of 2023 applies to a person who processes, controls or authorises the processing of any personal data in respect of commercial transactions in Grenada, including a person established outside Grenada who uses equipment or network services in Grenada for that processing.

The definition of personal data and the general processing grounds carry no publicly-available carve-out for personal data generally; the only publicly-made ground is scoped to sensitive personal data specifically, where section 21(1)(c) permits processing sensitive personal data that has been made public as a result of steps taken by the data subject.

So a scraper collecting ordinary personal data from Grenada, including for training a model, would need a lawful basis, ordinarily the data subject's consent, once the Act is brought into force. Section 1(2) delays commencement to a day the Minister appoints by Order in the Gazette, and no such Order has been located, so the Act does not currently bind anyone.

Section 10(1) of the Copyright Act, 2011 permits, without the copyright owner's authorisation, the reproduction of a short part of a published work in the form of a quotation, provided the reproduction is compatible with fair dealing and does not exceed the extent justified by the purpose. Section 10(2) requires the quotation to be accompanied by an indication of its source and the author's name, where the name appears in the work quoted.

The provision carries no headline-length or short-extract cap distinct from this fair-practice test, and no reported Grenadian decision applies it to a systematic news aggregator rather than an individual quoting a published work. Neighbouring rights under the Act, covering performers, producers of sound recordings and broadcasting organisations, do not extend to a print or online news publisher's own reporting.

Section 61 delays the Act's commencement to a day the Minister appoints by Order in the Gazette; WIPO Lex lists the Act as the current version of Grenada's copyright statute without stating a commencement date, and no dated commencement Order has been located.