Law / Laos

Laos

2 of 6 named instruments researched to a stage, across one of the six areas of law we track: 2 in force. As of 6 September 2026.

AI law none researched
Privacy law none researched
Scraping law 2
Cybersecurity law none researched
Age gating law none researched
News aggregation law none researched

in forceenacted but not yet in forceproposedrepealed, withdrawn or blocked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 law2 instruments, 2 in force

Research summary (305 words)

Laos has no scraping-specific statute, so general law governs each dimension separately, and no reported Lao case has tested any of them.

The Penal Code (Law No. 26/NA, 17 May 2017) criminalises illegal access to a computer system, but only where the actor defeats a special protection system with intent to obtain commercial, financial or private data, so a plain reading does not reach a scraper reading an unauthenticated public page; the Code separately criminalises intercepting non-public data transmissions and interfering with a computer system, neither of which is addressed to open-web reading.

No Lao statute or reported decision addresses the enforceability of a browsewrap or clickwrap terms-of-service against a scraper.

The Law on Intellectual Property No. 50/NA (20 November 2023) has no text-and-data-mining exception; its general fair-use provision permits quotation, teaching and research uses, incidental reproduction, and reproduction of newspaper and periodical articles by the press, broadcasting or wire, subject to a fair-practice and purpose-justified extent test and a source-attribution duty, but that exception does not cover reproduction obtained by circumventing a technological protection measure or removing rights-management information, so training a model on scraped copyrighted Lao content rests only on that general ground.

The same Law protects a compilation of data as a literary work only where the selection or arrangement of its contents is itself an intellectual creation, and expressly does not extend protection to the underlying data or material, so Laos confers no sui generis database right. Laos' personal-data statute, the Law on Electronic Data Protection No. 25/NA, is named in official listings; its text has not been read from primary source, so its reach over scraped public data is not described here.

No Lao 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.

Computer misuse

Penal Code, Illegal Access to a Computer System

Penal Code No. 26/NA (17 May 2017), arts. 164-165Official Gazette text of the Penal Code

archived copy

Read from a public archive copy, not the publisher directly. The publisher does not serve this page to automated readers, so a direct fetch was not an option here; how we access sources. Archived 2021. Publisher's page: https://laoofficialgazette.gov.la/kcfinder/upload/files/1Oct2020_Lao%20Penal%20Code_English%20version.pdf

In force. Binds public and private bodies.

What this law does

Article 165 criminalises using electronic instruments in a computer system that has a special protection system, with intent to illegally obtain commercial, financial or individuals' privately held data, punishable by three months to one year imprisonment and a fine of 2,000,000 to 5,000,000 kip. Article 164 separately criminalises disclosing the special protection measures themselves.

Because the offence's trigger is defeating a special protection system, a scraper reading a public, unauthenticated page without circumventing any access control falls outside a plain reading of the provision, and no reported Lao case has tested the point.

The Penal Code also criminalises, in the same chapter, illegal interception of non-public computer data transmissions (art. 167) and interference with a computer system (art. 170), neither of which is addressed to reading a page a publisher has made public.

What it requires

Copyright and text and data mining (TDM)

Law on Intellectual Property, Copyright Exceptions and Data Compilations

Law on Intellectual Property No. 50/NA (20 Nov 2023), arts. 103, 113Law No. 50/NA of November 20, 2023, on Intellectual Property, WIPO Lex official record and text

In force since 24 January 2024. Binds public and private bodies.

What this law does

Article 113 permits, without the copyright owner's consent, quotations from a lawfully published work compatible with fair use and not exceeding what the purpose justifies, including quotations from newspaper and periodical articles in the form of press summaries, and separately permits reproduction of newspaper and periodical articles on current economic, political or religious topics by the press, broadcasting or wire, and reproduction of works seen or heard while reporting a current event, each subject to a fair-use and source-indication test.

Laos has no text-and-data-mining exception distinct from this general fair-use ground, and Article 113 expressly does not apply to reproduction that requires circumventing a technological protection measure or removing rights-management information, so reproducing copyrighted Lao-hosted content for crawling or AI training rests only on the general fair-use ground and does not reach content behind a defeated technical measure.

Article 103 protects a compilation of data or other material as a literary work only where the selection or arrangement of its contents is itself an intellectual creation, and states that protection does not extend to the data or material itself, so Laos confers no sui generis database right of the kind some jurisdictions grant to a compiler regardless of originality.

What it requires

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.