Law / Iraq

Iraq

2 of 9 named instruments researched to a stage, across two of the six areas of law we track: 2 in force. As of 7 September 2026.

AI law none researched
Privacy law none researched
Scraping law 1
Cybersecurity law none researched
Age gating law none researched
News aggregation law 1

in forceenacted but not yet in forceproposedrepealed, withdrawn or blocked

Drafted with AI from the cited sources under the direction of UnGovr staff. UnGovr holds editorial responsibility for this page.

Scraping law1 instrument, 1 in force

Research summary (203 words)

Open-web crawling of public pages carries no dedicated Iraqi statute. Iraq enacted the Electronic Signature and Electronic Transactions Law No. 78 of 2012 (Official Gazette No. 4256, 5 November 2012), reported to carry offences on electronic records; its operative text is not reproduced here, so its provisions are not described. The 1969 Penal Code predates computer-specific offences and contains none.

The Draft Law on Combating Information Technology Crimes, which would criminalize unauthorized access to computer systems, remained before the Council of Representatives, unenacted, as of a 2026 position paper.

Copyright protects a database as a compilation rather than through a separate sui generis right: Law No. 3 of 1971 on Copyright, as amended by Coalition Provisional Authority Order No. 83 of 1 May 2004, lists compilations of data among the protected work types and extends the reproduction right to copying onto a digital or electronic storage medium, with no text-and-data-mining or AI-training-specific exception anywhere in the amended text.

No statute or case law addressing terms-of-service enforceability, robots.txt's legal weight, or an unfair-competition claim specific to scraping has been located; personal-data reach over scraped public data is researched under the privacy topic, which finds no comprehensive data-protection law and only a licensing-tied data-localization condition.

Database right

Law No. 3 of 1971 on Copyright, as amended by CPA Order No. 83, compilation protection and reproduction right (Arts. 2, 3, 8, 45)

Law No. 3 of 1971 on Copyright (Iraq), as amended by Coalition Provisional Authority Order No. 83 of 1 May 2004, Arts. 2, 3, 8, 45Coalition Provisional Authority Order No. 83 on Amendment to the Copyright Law, official English text as republished by WIPO Lex

In force since 1 May 2004. Binds public and private bodies.

What this law does

Coalition Provisional Authority Order No. 83 amended Iraq's 1971 Copyright Law to bring it into line with WTO intellectual-property standards. As amended, Article 2 lists compilations of data among the protected work types alongside computer programs, so a database attracts protection as a compilation rather than through a separate database right of its own.

Article 8 gives the author the exclusive right to reproduce a work in any manner or form, whether transitory or permanent, including onto a digital or electronic storage medium, and no person may do so without the author's or successors' written permission; the amended text carries no text-and-data-mining exception or AI-training-specific rule.

Article 45 makes unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or commercial use of a protected work an act of piracy, and no located Iraqi decision construes how the reproduction right applies to a scraper copying a publicly posted, unauthenticated compilation of data.

What it requires

News aggregation law1 instrument, 1 in force

Research summary (149 words)

Iraq has no press-publisher neighbouring right, no mandatory platform-to-publisher bargaining code, and no recognized hot-news misappropriation doctrine distinct from ordinary copyright law; each of those dimensions is a sourced absence rather than an unresolved question.

The relevant instrument is Law No. 3 of 1971 on Copyright, whose Article 14 lets any person, once a work is published, make short analyses and quotations for conveying, controversy, education, or information, provided the author's name and source are credited, and whose Article 16 separately lets newspapers, radio, and television publish, without the author's permission and by way of information, speeches read in public political, administrative, or judicial sessions and public political meetings addressed to the people.

No located Iraqi court decision applies either exception to a systematic news aggregator, as opposed to a traditional press review or broadcast report, and nothing in the Law addresses hyperlinking, framing, or a machine-readable text-and-data-mining reservation.

Snippet reproduction

Law No. 3 of 1971 on Copyright, quotation and current-events reporting exceptions (Arts. 14, 15 bis, 16-17)

Law No. 3 of 1971 on Copyright (Iraq), Arts. 14, 15 bis, 16-17Law No. 3 of 1971 on Copyright

In force since 21 January 1971. Binds public and private bodies.

What this law does

Article 14 lets any person, once a work is published, make analyses and short quotations for the purpose of conveying, controversy, education, edification, or information, without the author's permission, provided the author's name (if known) and the source are credited; the same article permits textbooks and works of history, literature, science, and art to take short extracts from previously published works on the same crediting condition.

Article 15 bis states that an exception to the author's exclusive rights is confined to special cases that do not conflict with the work's normal exploitation and do not unreasonably prejudice the rights holder's legitimate interests.

Article 16 separately lets newspapers, radio, and television publish, by way of information and without the author's permission, speeches read in public sessions of political, administrative, or judicial councils and addresses delivered at public political meetings directed to the people; Article 17 reserves to the speech's own author alone the right to publish a collection of his speeches or articles.

None of these provisions is capped at a headline-length or short-extract threshold for the Article 16 speech-reporting exception, and no located Iraqi decision construes either exception as applied to a systematic aggregator's reproduction of headlines and snippets.

Note and primary source

This page covers the instruments LexLint has researched to a stage. Instruments named in the corpus but not yet researched are counted in the head and are not listed here. Every entry carries its own primary source on its note page. This is a research index, not legal advice.