Saint Kitts and Nevis

Section 12 makes it an offence for a person to knowingly publish child pornography through a computer system, produce it for the purpose of publication through a computer system, or possess it in a computer system or on a data storage medium for the purpose of publication, punishable on conviction on indictment by a fine of up to fifty thousand dollars or five years' imprisonment for an individual, or a fine of up to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a corporation.

Section 12(3) defines child pornography to include material that visually depicts a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct, a person who appears to be a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct, or a realistic image representing a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct, a definition that does not require the depicted subject to be a real, identifiable child, so a wholly computer-generated or AI-synthesised depiction meeting it can fall within the ban.

A defence applies to publishing and possession, but not to production, where the material was for a bona fide scientific, research, medical or law enforcement purpose.

A note in the Revised Laws text records that the current section 12 was formerly section 13, the original section 12 having been repealed and sections 13 and 14 renumbered by Act 26 of 2012; whether the child-pornography definition's own wording changed at that renumbering, or was carried forward unchanged from the Act's original 2009 text, is not established in the available sources.

Section 4 applies the Act to a private body processing personal data in respect of commercial transactions and, subject to a territorial-nexus test, to any other person, and section 6 binds the State. Section 7 requires a data user to obtain a data subject's consent before processing personal data, or to process sensitive personal data only on one of the specific grounds in section 20.

Sections 8 to 13 set notice-and-choice, disclosure, security, retention, data-integrity and access duties, and Part III gives a data subject a right to access and to seek rectification of their personal data, exercised through the body and appealable to the Information Commissioner and then the Court.

Section 1(2) provides that the Act comes into force on a day fixed by the Minister by Order published in the Gazette; no commencement order has been located, so the Act's substantive duties are not yet confirmed to be in operation.

Section 4 makes it an offence to knowingly access the whole or part of a computer system without lawful excuse or justification, or in excess of one, punishable on summary conviction by a fine of up to five thousand dollars or one year's imprisonment for a first conviction, rising to ten thousand dollars or two years for a subsequent one. Sections 5 and 6 similarly criminalise interfering with data and interfering with a computer system.

Section 11 creates a heavier offence, up to seventy-five thousand dollars or five years for gaining access to a restricted computer system (one the Minister has designated by Order), rising to one hundred thousand dollars or seven years where the access occurs in the course of an offence under sections 4 to 7.

Unlike a computer-misuse offence conditioned on infringing a security measure, section 4's trigger is accessing a system without lawful excuse or justification, which does not by its own terms require circumventing a technical control, so whether reading a public, unauthenticated page falls inside or outside a plain reading of the section is less clear-cut than in a jurisdiction with an explicit security-measure element, and no reported Kittitian or Nevisian case construes the point.

Section 16(1) provides that, unless the parties otherwise agree, an offer and its acceptance may be expressed by an act intended to result in an electronic communication, such as touching or clicking an appropriate icon on a webpage, confirming that a clickwrap acceptance of terms can validly form a contract.

Section 16 does not separately address whether a browsewrap notice, posted without requiring an affirmative click, is enforceable against a person who never accepted it, and no reported case construes that question in this jurisdiction.

Section 17 attributes an electronic record to its originator where it was sent by a person the originator authorised, or by the originator's own 'electronic agent', a program or automated means configured by that person to initiate or respond to an electronic record without individual review.

Section 4(3) makes a compilation of data or other material, in machine-readable or other form, eligible for copyright protection as a literary work only if, by reason of the selection or arrangement of its contents, the compilation constitutes the author's own intellectual creation, and expressly provides that this protection does not extend to any data or other material forming part of the compilation.

The Act creates no separate sui generis database right of the kind some jurisdictions grant to a database's maker regardless of originality, so a non-original compilation, or the underlying data within an original one, is not protected on this ground. The Act was assented to on 25 June 2024 and published in Official Gazette No. 36 of 2024 on 4 July 2024, repealing the prior Copyright Act, Cap. 18.08, but its text does not separately state a commencement day distinct from its enactment.

Section 53(1) permits, without infringing copyright or related rights, fair dealing with a work for the purposes of criticism or review of that or another work, or fair dealing with a work other than a photograph for the purpose of reporting current events, so long as it is accompanied by sufficient acknowledgment (defined in section 51 as identifying the work by its title and identifying the author, subject to exceptions).

Section 55 sets the general factors for determining fair dealing across the Act's exceptions: the nature of the work, the extent and substantiality of the part used relative to the whole, the purpose and character of the use, and the effect on the potential market for or value of the work.

The Act carries no headline-length or short-extract cap distinct from this fair-dealing test, and no reported decision in this jurisdiction applies section 53 to a systematic news aggregator rather than an individual quoting a published work. The Act's neighbouring rights, covering performers and producers of sound recordings, do not extend to a print or online news publisher's own reporting.