Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea's Cybercrime Code Act 2016 is understood to criminalise unauthorised access to and interception of computer systems and data, but the operative text of its provisions is not reproduced in the available copies of the Act, so its authorization test, penalty tiers, and reach over a public, unauthenticated page are not described here.

The Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Act 2000 is the primary confirmed law reaching automated collection of Papua New Guinea-published content: it excludes from protection any idea, procedure, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, and permits reproduction without the rightholder's authorization only within named exceptions covering private use, quotation, teaching, reprographic copying by a public institution, reporting current events, and adaptation of a computer program by its lawful owner.

None of these named exceptions is a text-and-data-mining exception, so bulk automated reproduction or ingestion of published works for model training falls outside them and requires the rightholder's authorization.

A substantial part of a database in digital form is expressly excluded from the private-reproduction privilege, and a database attracts copyright only as a compilation where its selection or arrangement is original, so the Act creates no separate sui generis database right of the European kind.

No Papua New Guinea statute or reported decision addresses the legal weight of robots.txt, the enforceability of a browsewrap or clickwrap terms of service against a scraper, or a distinct trespass-to-chattels or hot-news misappropriation doctrine.

Papua New Guinea's Classification of Publication (Censorship) Act 1989 (No. 18 of 1989) establishes the Censorship Board and the Office of the Chief Censor to classify publications, films, and advertising matter, and defines a minor as a person under the age of 18 years.

A publication classified as restricted, or a film or advertising matter classified as an “R” film, may not be sold, let on hire, displayed, or delivered to a minor, and a person in charge of a restricted publication area must not permit a minor to enter it; a person who publishes a classified publication or film otherwise than in accordance with these conditions, or who allows a minor to enter a restricted publication area, is guilty of an offence.

The Act does not apply to a publication sponsored by the National Government or a Provincial Government, and its definitions of “publish” and “publication” are confined to selling, hiring, exhibiting, screening, displaying, and advertising physical publications, films, and broadcasting; no provision extends the classification or supply-restriction scheme to an online service, and no separate law addresses social-media minor access, app-store age verification, or an age-appropriate design duty for a service likely to be accessed by children.

The National Information and Communication Technology Act 2009 empowers the Head of State to make content regulations covering advertising content and complaint handling for a licensed content service, but its own section 217(2) provides that the content regulations must not address censorship matters addressed by or under the Classification of Publication (Censorship) Act 1989, so it creates no age-related duty of its own.

The Cybercrime Code Act 2016 criminalises child pornography (s. 18) and child online grooming (s. 19) committed through an electronic system or device, and Part V imposes criminal liability on an ICT Service Provider that monitors or otherwise deals with illegal content it knows about, but each of these duties binds a person or provider generally rather than requiring an operator to verify or gate a user's age.

The Lukautim Pikinini Act 2015 (the Child Protection Act) bars publishing information identifying a child concerned in a protection proceeding (s. 96) and otherwise addresses parental responsibility, child protection orders, and family services, without any provision addressing an internet or online service.

Papua New Guinea has no press-publisher neighbouring right of the European kind, no compelled platform-to-publisher bargaining code, no codified hot-news or misappropriation doctrine, and no statute or reported decision addressing whether linking to or framing a news article is a communication to the public.

Reproducing a headline or short extract of a news article falls to the Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Act 2000's exception for reproduction, broadcasting, or other communication to the public for informatory purposes: the Act permits reproducing in a newspaper or periodical, or broadcasting or otherwise communicating to the public, an article published in a newspaper or periodical on current economic, political, or religious topics, except where the right to authorise that use is expressly reserved on the copies, and separately permits the reproduction and broadcasting or other communication to the public of short excerpts of a work seen or heard in the course of reporting current events, to the extent justified by the purpose.

The Act carries no text-and-data-mining exception, so an aggregator's automated indexing of news content for training or bulk republication must fit within this exception, or the Act's separate quotation exception, or else infringe.