Law / Palau

Palau

2 of 5 named instruments researched to a stage, across two of the six areas of law we track: 2 in force. As of 5 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in forceenacted but not yet in forceproposedrepealed, withdrawn or blocked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 (290 words)

Palau has no scraping-specific statute, so general law governs each dimension separately.

The Penal Code's computer-crimes chapter (17 PNCA Chapter 31) criminalizes knowingly accessing a computer, computer system, or computer network without authorization, defining authorization by reference to the permission of the owner, lessor, or rightful user rather than by whether a technical security measure was defeated, so whether reading a public, unauthenticated page falls inside or outside the offense has not been tested in a reported Palauan decision.

No Palauan court has ruled on the enforceability of a browsewrap or clickwrap terms-of-service against a scraper.

The Republic of Palau Copyright Act of 2003 permits quotation, reproduction for teaching, library reprographic reproduction, and reproduction of a newspaper or periodical article on current topics unless the right to reproduce is expressly reserved, but Palau has not enacted a text-and-data-mining exception, so training a model on scraped copyrighted text rests only on those general exceptions if they can be stretched to cover it.

The Act's compilation provision protects only an original selection or arrangement of preexisting material and expressly excludes reproducing the whole or a substantial part of a database in digital form from its private-use exception, so Palau confers no sui generis database right beyond ordinary copyright in an original compilation.

Palau's Privacy Act, 6 PNCA sections 205-206, binds only a government agency's own storage, retention, and further use of personal information it maintains, and does not reach a private party's collection of personal data, so scraping personal data from a public Palauan website is not confirmed to be restricted by that Act.

No Palauan 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, unauthorized computer access

17 PNCA secs. 3101, 3109-3111 (Computer Crimes, Unauthorized Computer Access)Penal Code, Title 17 PNCA Chapter 31, official Palau National Code Annotated text

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 2023. Publisher's page: https://palauosp.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Penal-Code-17-PNCA.pdf

In force. Binds public and private bodies.

What this law does

Section 3101(14) defines accessing a computer, computer system, or computer network 'without authorization' as without the permission of, or in excess of the permission granted by, its owner, lessor, or rightful user, a permission-based test rather than one that turns on defeating a technical security measure.

Sections 3109 through 3111 grade unauthorized computer access into three tiers: a class B felony where the person knowingly accesses without authorization, obtains information, and the offense is aggravated by commercial or private financial gain, furtherance of another crime, an information value exceeding $5,000, or information legally protected against disclosure; a class C felony for the same access and obtaining of information without such an aggravating factor; and a misdemeanor for knowingly accessing without authorization alone, without obtaining information.

Because the offense's authorization test asks about the owner's permission rather than requiring proof that a security measure was defeated, whether reading a public, unauthenticated page is authorized has not been tested in a reported Palauan decision.

What it requires

News aggregation law1 instrument, 1 in force

Research summary (221 words)

Palau has no press-publisher neighbouring right and no mandatory platform-to-publisher bargaining code; the Republic of Palau Copyright Act of 2003 is the only law reaching an aggregator's reproduction of news content.

Its news and current-events provision permits reproducing, broadcasting, or otherwise communicating to the public an article from a newspaper or periodical on current economic, political, or religious topics unless the right to authorize that reproduction is expressly reserved on the copies, and separately permits reproducing or broadcasting short excerpts of a work seen or heard in the course of a current event, to the extent justified by the purpose of reporting it.

Neither provision carries a headline-length or short-extract cap distinct from those tests, and no reported Palauan decision applies either to a systematic news aggregator rather than a single republication. The Act's compilation provision protects an original selection or arrangement of preexisting material, not a mere collection of facts, so it confers no sui generis database right of the kind the European Union's Database Directive creates.

No statute or case law addresses whether a hyperlink is a communication to the public, whether framing or inline display changes the answer, or whether an unfair-competition or hot-news doctrine survives alongside copyright, and the 2003 Act predates the concept of a machine-readable text-and-data-mining reservation, so no opt-out mechanism of that kind exists.

Snippet reproduction

Republic of Palau Copyright Act of 2003 (RPPL No. 6-38) sec. 11 (Reproduction, broadcasting, and other communication to the public for information purposes)Republic of Palau Copyright Act of 2003 (RPPL No. 6-38), full text, WIPO Lex

In force since 26 November 2003. Binds private bodies.

What this law does

Section 11(a) permits, without the author's or copyright owner's authorization, 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, or a broadcast work of the same character, but this permission does not apply where the right to authorize that reproduction, broadcasting, or communication is expressly reserved on the copies.

Section 11(b) separately permits, for the purpose of reporting current events, reproducing and broadcasting or otherwise communicating to the public short excerpts of a work seen or heard in the course of those events, to the extent justified by the purpose. Both permissions are subject to indicating the source and the author's name so far as practicable.

Section 7(b)(3) excludes reproduction of the whole or a substantial part of a database in digital form from the Act's separate private-use exception, and the Act's compilation provision protects only an original selection or arrangement of preexisting material, so it creates no sui generis right in a database's contents.

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.