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Law / Cook Islands

Cook Islands

3 of 4 named instruments researched to a stage, across three of the ten areas of law we track: 3 in force. As of .

  1. AI law
  2. Privacy law
  3. Scraping law 1
  4. Cybersecurity law
  5. Communications law not researched
  6. Content moderation law not researched
  7. Product and AI liability law not researched
  8. Digital accessibility law not researched
  9. Age gating law 1
  10. Reuse law 1

in forcenot yet in forceblocked by a courtproposedno longer in force

Scraping law1 instrument, 1 in force

Research summary (201 words)

The Copyright Act 2013 gives an owner an exclusive right to copy, reproduce, and communicate an original work to the public, reaches computer programs as literary works, and makes circumventing a work's copy-protection technology an offence, so an unauthorised crawler or trainer copying a substantial part of a Cook Islands work outside a stated exception risks civil and criminal exposure under it; a compilation of data, including in electronic or machine-readable form, is protected only as a collective work under ordinary copyright, so database protection here is compilation-only rather than a separate sui generis right.

Personal data collected by scraping falls outside the reach of any Cook Islands statute, because no comprehensive personal-data law exists here, a finding recorded under the privacy topic.

A Cybercrime Legislation Amendment Act 2026 was passed on and came into force on , and would be the natural home for a computer-misuse or unauthorised-access offence, but its text is not available from the sources checked here, so its content and the resulting posture on computer misuse are not described.

No provision of the Copyright Act 2013 or the Cybercrime Legislation Amendment Act 2026 addresses terms-of-service enforceability, robots.txt, or an AI-training-specific rule.

Age gating law1 instrument, 1 in force

Research summary (104 words)

The Cook Islands has no social-media minor-access restriction, app-store age-verification requirement, or age-appropriate design code.

Adult content is instead regulated through the Films and Censorship Act 1985, a licensing and classification regime for film exhibitors, renters, and dealers in documents and sound recordings, under which a censor classifies films, video tapes, documents, and sound recordings as indecent or restricted, and it is an offence to sell, deliver, or exhibit indecent material to a person under the age of 18 years.

The Act's classification and minor-supply duties address physical film, video tape, document, and sound-recording distribution and exhibition rather than an online or app-based service.

Adult content age verification (AV)

Films and Censorship Act 1985, film, video, document and sound-recording classification and minor-supply restriction

Films and Censorship Act 1985, No. 1 (Cook Islands)Text of the Films and Censorship Act 1985, Cook Islands Sessional Legislation database, PacLII, archived copy

archived copyRead 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 . Publisher's page: https://www.paclii.org/ck/legis/num_act/faca1985207/

In force. Binds private bodies.

What this law does

Sections 4 and 5 require a person renting or exhibiting film to the public to hold a renter's or exhibitor's licence issued by the Minister. Sections 16 to 18 require every film to be approved by a censor before public exhibition, and the censor may approve a film generally, refuse approval, require excisions, or approve it subject to exhibition being restricted to a specified class of persons. Section 23 extends the same approval requirement to video tapes sold or rented to the public.

Sections 28 to 31 give the censor the function of classifying a document or sound recording as indecent, as not indecent, or as indecent unless its circulation is restricted to a specified age or class of persons, considering among other things the age groups to or among whom it is likely to be distributed.

Section 32 makes it an offence to sell, deliver by way of hire, or possess for sale or hire any indecent document or sound recording, and separately an offence to sell, deliver, give, exhibit, or offer to a person under the age of 18 years any document or sound recording which is indecent. Section 25 makes it an offence for a renter's licence holder to rent a video tape otherwise than in accordance with the section 23 approval requirement.

The Act is administered by the Crown Law Office through an appointed Chief Censor. No source stating the day the Act came into operation has been located. Article 45 of the Constitution of the Cook Islands brings an Act into operation on the day its Bill is assented to unless the Act specifies another date.

What it requires

Reuse law1 instrument, 1 in force

Research summary (116 words)

The Cook Islands has no press-publisher neighbouring right and no platform-to-publisher bargaining code; the Copyright Act 2013 is the only law reaching an aggregator's reproduction of Cook Islands news content.

Section 16 permits quoting from a work already lawfully made available to the public where the amount quoted is justifiable and the source and author are acknowledged, and section 21 separately permits copying or communicating a newspaper article or other work of a similar nature, or excerpts of a work seen or heard, for the purpose of reporting current events, unless the copyright owner has expressly prohibited that use.

No statute or reported Cook Islands decision addresses hyperlinking, framing, hot-news misappropriation, or a machine-readable text-and-data-mining opt-out.

Where nothing was found3 areas of law

These areas of law were researched here and no instrument was recorded. Each finding says what the research checked, as of the date under it. It describes our search, not a guarantee that no such law exists.

AI law

The Cook Islands has no AI-transparency, AI-risk-obligations, AI-training-data, AI-prohibited-practices, AI-governance, or AI-sector-rules statute. No AI strategy or policy document has been located.

The Crimes Act 1969 contains no provision addressing a computer, a computer-generated image, or an automated system, and the Crimes (Sexual Offences) Amendment Act 2023, which replaced most of the Crimes Act's sexual-offence provisions, likewise names no artificially generated or computer-synthesised image or deepfake; its offences turn on sexual connection or indecency with a real person, not a simulated one.

As of .

Privacy law

The Cook Islands has no comprehensive personal-data or data-protection statute reaching a private-sector controller.

The Official Information Act 2008 gives a person a right to access personal information a Ministry, Minister of the Crown, or organisation holds about them and, under section 28, to request its correction, but section 26(5) expressly imposes no duty on any Ministry, Minister, or organisation to compile files of personal information, and no provision of the Act binds a private party: it is a government-transparency and records-access statute, not a data-protection regime.

The Crimes Act 1969 contains no provision addressing personal data, unauthorised disclosure of personal information, or an information-privacy right.

As of .

Cybersecurity law

The Cook Islands has no product-security, vulnerability-and-incident-reporting, sector-specific cyber-resilience, or baseline reasonable-security statute reaching a software product, digital service, or system operator.

The Cook Islands Parliament's own Acts Library, its register of legislation from 1954 to 2026, lists a Cybercrime Legislation Amendment Act 2026 (No. 5), but neither the signed Act nor its earlier Bill is available online as machine-readable text: both are published only as PDFs with no extractable text layer, which is not evidence that the Act itself is empty of security-relevant duties.

Its content therefore rests on its title and the uniform drafting pattern of Pacific-region cybercrime statutes generally, a set of computer-intrusion offences committed against a system, which would place it in the scraping topic's computer-misuse family rather than here; that classification is an open question rather than a confirmed finding.

The Telecommunications Act 2019 (No. 7) requires a telecommunications service provider to apply appropriate security safeguards before it collects, uses, maintains or discloses information about a customer without the customer's consent (section 24(1)(b)), but that clause sits inside the Act's own comprehensive customer-information regime, which in the same section also sets consent, accuracy, correction and disclosure-notice duties (section 24(1) to (6)) and a parallel confidentiality duty over communications content (section 25).

The whole shape is the sector's own personal-information regime rather than a standalone security statute, so its safeguards clause is a privacy-topic security-of-processing provision on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Article 32 pattern and is not filed here; the Cook Islands has no dedicated privacy or data-protection act and no breach-notification duty of any kind was found in its legislation register, so there is no companion privacy row to name for the seam.

Section 92(1)(d) of the Telecommunications Act lets the Competition and Regulatory Authority prescribe technical standards for a telecommunications network to protect against unauthorised interference or unauthorised access, but this is a discretionary rule-making power the Authority has not exercised into a published determination, so it creates no present duty.

The Financial Supervisory Commission, which licenses every bank, insurer, money-changing business and trustee company in the Cook Islands' offshore financial-services sector, has issued Banking Prudential Statements on operational risk (BPS10), business continuity management (BPS11) and outsourcing (BPS12) under section 65 of the Banking Act 2011, but BPS10 treats system failure only as one generic component of operational risk alongside fraud and workplace safety, with no cybersecurity, information-security or IT-risk requirement of its own, so no sector cyber-resilience regime reaching a financial-services licensee was found either.

As of .

Case law

  • No current case law for Cook Islands AI law
  • No current case law for Cook Islands privacy law
  • No current case law for Cook Islands scraping law
  • No current case law for Cook Islands cybersecurity law
  • No current case law for Cook Islands communications law
  • No current case law for Cook Islands content moderation law
  • No current case law for Cook Islands product and AI liability law
  • No current case law for Cook Islands digital accessibility law
  • No current case law for Cook Islands age gating law
  • No current case law for Cook Islands reuse law
Drafted with AI

Drafted with AI from the cited sources under the direction of UnGovr staff. UnGovr holds editorial responsibility for this page. How this site is made

This page covers the instruments LexLint has researched to a stage. Instruments named in the law library 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.