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Law / Palau

Palau

2 of 5 named instruments researched to a stage, across two of the ten areas of law we track: 2 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
  10. Reuse law 1

in forcenot yet in forceblocked by a courtproposedno longer in force

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 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 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. The Act that enacted the chapter, Republic of Palau Public Law 9-21, takes effect ninety days after the President's approval, and no statement of the resulting day has been located.

What it requires

Reuse 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.

Where nothing was found4 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

Palau has no AI-specific statute, bill, or regulation addressing AI-transparency or output-labeling duties, high-risk system obligations, training-data duties, prohibited practices, governance requirements, or sector-specific AI rules.

The Penal Code's computer-crime chapter (17 PNCA Chapter 31) and the Copyright Act of 2003 reach conduct an AI system might carry out, such as unauthorized computer access or copyright infringement, but neither statute addresses an AI system or AI-generated content as such.

As of .

Privacy law

Palau has no comprehensive private-sector data-protection statute and no dedicated data-protection supervisory authority. Title 6 PNCA sections 205-206, the Privacy Act, bind only a government agency that maintains personal information: it must protect that information from loss, unauthorized access, modification, disclosure, or misuse, must not retain it longer than its lawful purpose requires, and generally must not use information obtained for one purpose for a different purpose.

Neither section reaches a private company's handling of personal data. The Olbiil Era Kelulau passed the Cybersecurity Act, RPPL 12-8, which President Surangel Whipps Jr. signed on , creating a Bureau of Cybersecurity and reported duties on government agencies to safeguard confidential and personal data and to notify affected individuals after a breach; its provisions are not described here.

As of .

Cybersecurity law

Palau enacted the Republic of Palau Public Law (RPPL) No. 12-8, Creation of a Comprehensive Cybersecurity System for Palau, on , after the Olbiil Era Kelulau's Senate passed the bill as S.B. No. 12-9 with amendments (SD1) on , transmitted it to the House of Delegates the same day, and the Senate re-passed it with the House's own amendments (HD2) on .

The enacted law is preserved on the legislature's own site only as a scanned image with no machine-readable text layer, so its substantive requirements, including whether it sets a design or vulnerability-handling duty on a private operator or manufacturer, a reporting clock, or a sector-bound cyber-resilience regime, are not described here.

A second bill, the National Digital Infrastructure and Cybersecurity Framework Act (Bill No. 2025/3), introduced and assigned to the Standing Committee on Education, would by the legislature's own description create a Palau Digital Authority, mandate encryption, authentication and data-protection protocols for government networks, establish a national data center, and mandate risk assessments and incident-response plans for utilities and financial systems; it has no recorded progress since introduction and has not been enacted, so it is not filed as an instrument here.

Palau's Penal Code, Title 17 PNCA sections 3109 through 3111, creates the offenses of unauthorized computer access in the first, second and third degree, each turning on a person knowingly accessing a computer, computer system or computer network without authorization; these bind the person doing the accessing rather than the operator or manufacturer of the system, so they belong to this jurisdiction's scraping-topic coverage rather than to this one.

Palau's privacy statute, the Privacy Act at Title 6 PNCA sections 205 to 206, is this jurisdiction's privacy-topic row and is not restated here.

No enacted Palau law was found setting product-security requirements for a software product or connected device, an actionable vulnerability or incident-reporting duty, a sector-bound cyber-resilience regime, or a general reasonable-security baseline statute; the closest candidate, RPPL No. 12-8, cannot yet be read to confirm whether it does any of those things.

As of .

Age gating law

Palau has no adult-content age-verification law, social-media minor-access restriction, app-store age-verification requirement, or age-appropriate design code.

The Penal Code's Child Exploitation chapter (17 PNCA Chapter 18) criminalizes child pornography, electronic enticement of a child, and indecent electronic display to a child, and its Offenses Related to Obscenity chapter (17 PNCA Chapter 49) criminalizes disseminating pornographic material to a minor, but each offense turns on the offender's own knowledge or reckless disregard that the recipient is a minor rather than imposing a verification or age-gating duty on a service that publishes, distributes, or transmits content.

As of .

Case law

  • No current case law for Palau AI law
  • No current case law for Palau privacy law
  • No current case law for Palau scraping law
  • No current case law for Palau cybersecurity law
  • No current case law for Palau communications law
  • No current case law for Palau content moderation law
  • No current case law for Palau product and AI liability law
  • No current case law for Palau digital accessibility law
  • No current case law for Palau age gating law
  • No current case law for Palau 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.