Solomon Islands

Solomon Islands has no comprehensive data-protection statute and no dedicated data-protection supervisory authority.

Its closest personal-data rules sit in Part 11 (Relations with Consumers) of the Telecommunications Act 2009, which binds a telecommunications service provider's collection, use, maintenance, and disclosure of a consumer's information, requires the service provider to take reasonable steps to keep a consumer's communications confidential, and gives a consumer the right to inspect and correct the service provider's records about them.

A contravention of the consent duty in section 72(1) or the confidentiality duty in section 73(2) is itself a criminal offence under Part 19 of the Act, carrying a fine or imprisonment. These duties run to a licensed telecommunications service provider in its dealings with its own consumers, not to personal-data processing generally, so they do not reach a business collecting personal data outside the telecommunications sector.

A comprehensive data-protection and privacy bill has reportedly been in development with international donor support, but it has not been introduced to Parliament, and its provisions are not verified here.

Solomon Islands has no scraping-specific statute, so general law addresses each dimension separately, and much of it is untested. No court has ruled on whether crawling a public, unauthenticated web page is lawful, and no Solomon Islands court has ruled on the enforceability of a browsewrap or clickwrap terms-of-service against a scraper.

The Telecommunications Act 2009 creates an offence for intentionally and without right accessing telecommunications facilities by infringing a security measure with the intent of obtaining telecommunications data, and for intercepting by technical means a transmission not intended for the accused; because the Act's own scope is the regulation of licensed telecommunications service providers, whether these offences reach a general web server or application outside the telecommunications sector, as opposed to a telecommunications operator's own network and subscriber data, is unsettled, and no reported case addresses the point.

No dedicated cybercrime statute has been identified. The Copyright Act (Chapter 138) permits fair dealing with a work for research or private study, and separately for criticism, review, or reporting current events, but Solomon Islands has not enacted a text-and-data-mining exception, so training a model on scraped copyrighted text finds support, if any, only in the narrower research-or-private-study ground.

"Literary work" under the Copyright Act is defined to include any written table or compilation, so a compilation of scraped data attracts ordinary copyright protection rather than a separate sui generis database right, and no broader database right has been identified.

Solomon Islands has no comprehensive data-protection statute; the Telecommunications Act 2009 gives a telecommunications service provider's own consumer a consent and confidentiality right over information the provider holds about them, but that duty runs to the regulated service provider in its dealings with its consumers, not generally to whoever collects personal data, so it does not by itself reach personal data scraped from a public Solomon Islands website by an outside party.

No Solomon Islands 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.

Solomon Islands has no press-publisher neighbouring right and no mandatory platform-to-publisher bargaining code; the general copyright framework of the Copyright Act (Chapter 138) is the only law reaching an aggregator's reproduction of news content.

Its general exceptions provision permits fair dealing with a literary, dramatic or musical work for the purpose of reporting current events in a newspaper, magazine or similar periodical, or by means of broadcasting or in a cinematograph film, if accompanied by a sufficient acknowledgement, alongside separate fair dealing grounds for research, private study, criticism and review.

The provision carries no headline-length or short-extract cap distinct from the fair-dealing and acknowledgement conditions themselves, and no reported Solomon Islands decision applies it to a systematic news aggregator rather than a single report of a current event.

"Literary work" is defined to include any written table or compilation, so a compilation of news content attracts ordinary copyright protection rather than a separate sui generis database right, and the Act, dated to 1988, carries no machine-readable text-and-data-mining reservation or opt-out mechanism.

No statute or case law addresses whether a hyperlink is itself a communication to the public, or whether framing or inline display changes the answer, and no hot-news or misappropriation doctrine distinct from ordinary copyright law has been identified.