in forcenot yet in forceblocked by a courtproposedno longer in force
Scraping law1 instrument, 1 in force
Research summary (273 words)
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines has no scraping-specific statute, so general law governs each dimension separately. No reported Vincentian decision addresses unauthorised access to a public, unauthenticated web page, the enforceability of a browsewrap or clickwrap terms of service against a scraper, or the legal weight of a robots.txt directive, and no statute assigns robots.txt a legal weight or imposes an AI-training-specific rule.
The Government's own portal lists a Cybercrime Act, 2016 among its official Acts; the operative text of its offence provisions is not reproduced in the copies available for this description, so no computer-misuse instrument is recorded here.
The Copyright Act, 2003 (Act No. 21 of 2003) permits fair dealing with a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work for research or private study and for criticism, review or reporting current events, subject to a four-factor fairness test, but has no text-and-data-mining exception, so training a model on scraped Vincentian text can rest only on the narrow research-or-private-study ground.
A written table or compilation is protected only as an ordinary literary work conditioned on originality, so the Act confers no sui generis database right, and data drawn from an unoriginal compilation falls outside copyright altogether.
The Electronic Transactions Act, 2015 (Act No. 6 of 2015), which repealed and replaced an earlier Electronic Transactions Act, requires a paper-form access requirement to be satisfied by an equivalent accessible electronic form, but that duty runs between a supplier and its own consumer and does not reach an unrelated party's automated collection of a website's content.
No statute or reported case establishes a Vincentian unfair-competition, misappropriation or trespass doctrine distinct from the causes of action above.
Section 50 permits fair dealing with a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work for the purposes of research or private study without infringing copyright, subject to section 52's four-factor fairness test. Section 51 permits fair dealing for criticism or review of a work or a performance, and a separate fair-dealing ground for reporting current events using a protected work other than a photograph, each ground (except reporting current events) requiring a sufficient acknowledgement.
Section 52 directs a court determining whether a dealing is fair to weigh the nature of the work, the extent and substantiality of the part used, the purpose and character of the use, and the effect on the potential market for or commercial value of the work.
The Act has no express text-and-data-mining exception, so reproducing scraped Vincentian text at scale to train a model can rest only on the narrow research-or-private-study ground, whose private, non-commercial character is a poor fit for large-scale commercial training. Section 2 defines a literary work to include a written table or compilation.
Section 5(1)(a) makes copyright subsist only in an original literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work, so a compilation is protected only as an ordinary literary work conditioned on originality of its selection or arrangement. The Act confers no sui generis database right, and extracting unoriginal underlying data from a compilation falls outside copyright altogether.
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines has no standalone statute setting security requirements a software product or connected device must meet before or after it reaches the market, no vulnerability-disclosure or incident-reporting duty running from a private-sector manufacturer or platform operator to an authority or to users, no sector cyber-resilience regime naming a digital service, and no general reasonable-security or information-security-programme statute binding a business simply because it holds covered information.
The Cybercrime Act, 2016 appears among the Government's own list of official Acts at gov.vc, but its operative text is not reproduced in any copy located from the sources searched here, matching the scraping topic's own finding for this jurisdiction that no computer-misuse instrument can be recorded from it; in any event, a computer-misuse offence alone binds the intruder rather than the operator or manufacturer of the system accessed, and belongs to the scraping topic's computer-misuse family, not this one.
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines currently has no comprehensive personal-data statute in force at all: the Privacy Act, 2003 (Act No. 18 of 2003) would regulate personal information held by a public authority and would carry its own security-of-processing duty, but it has never been brought into force because the commencement order needed to activate it has never been made, and no Data Protection Act, 2021 could be confirmed to exist from the two specialist regional resources that catalogue Caribbean data-protection legislation.
That finding, and any comprehensive-regime security clause a confirmed Act would otherwise carry under this topic's Test 2, is documented in the privacy topic and is not repeated here. Saint Vincent and the Grenadines does have a sector cyber-resilience regime for licensed banks, the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank's Electronic Banking and Technology Risk Management standards, filed as rows of their own.
The Eastern Caribbean Central Bank, the regional monetary authority for the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union of which Saint Vincent and the Grenadines is a member, issued Banking Prudential Standard No. 3 of 2022 (the Prudential Standard for Electronic Banking, effective ) under section 184 of the Banking Act, binding every institution licensed under Saint Vincent and the Grenadines' own Banking Act, No. 4 of 2015 by name in that standard's own definitions section; it requires a security-control process for e-banking, a written e-banking incident response plan, and, once a security breach or disruptive incident occurs, a report to the Central Bank within 3 days of the occurrence, with any further update also to be reported, and an institution found in violation is subject to remedial action under section 75 of the Banking Act.
The same Central Bank separately issued the Prudential Standards for the Management of Operational Risk for Institutions Licenced Under the Banking Act (effective ), which defines cyber risk as a category of operational risk arising from the failure of a licensed institution's information technology systems and requires every licensed financial institution, again including those licensed under Saint Vincent and the Grenadines' Banking Act, to manage that exposure, including where it arises from outsourcing.
Neither standard arms a private plaintiff; each runs through the Central Bank's own supervisory and remedial powers rather than a published fine schedule.
No dedicated CERT-establishing or cybersecurity-agency statute was located: the Government's own portal (gov.vc) and the Eastern Caribbean Telecommunications Authority's site each served only a JavaScript shell under both the compliant and stealth crawler tiers, so the search for a Vincentian telecommunications-sector or CERT statute rests on the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank's own published standards and the WIPO Lex and DPO Caribbean fallback resources rather than a full sweep of the domestic statute book.
In Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, the Prudential Standard for Electronic Banking of the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank requires an institution licensed under the Banking Act to implement a comprehensive security process for its e-banking systems.
In Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, the Prudential Standard for Electronic Banking of the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank requires an institution licensed under the Banking Act to send all incident reports and its response to the Central Bank within 3 days of the occurrence.
In Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, the Prudential Standard on Technology Risk Management of the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank says the Board of an institution licensed under the Banking Act is ultimately responsible for effective oversight of all IT and cybersecurity risks, systems and processes.
In Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, the Prudential Standard on Technology Risk Management of the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank provides that an institution licensed under the Banking Act shall alert the ECCB within 24 hours of becoming aware of a cyber-incident.
The Eastern Caribbean Central Bank issued the Prudential Standard for Electronic Banking in exercise of the powers conferred on it by section 184 of the Banking Act. The standard applies to all institutions licensed under the Banking Act. The standard comes into effect on .
Paragraph 5.2.1 of the standard requires a licensed financial institution to ensure that the necessary security control infrastructure is in place to secure e-banking systems and data from both internal and external threats. Paragraph 5.2.2 of the standard requires a comprehensive security process, inclusive of policies and procedures that address possible internal and external security threats in terms of incident prevention and the appropriate response.
Paragraph 6.4 of the standard requires the security process implemented by the institution to be submitted to the Central Bank. The standard states that institutions found in violation of it are subject to remedial actions specified in section 75 of the Banking Act.
Technology Risk Standard cyber governance, Prudential Standard on Technology Risk Management, paras. 5.2.4 and Board and Senior Management rolesText of the standard as published by the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank
In force since .Binds private bodies.
What this law does
The Eastern Caribbean Central Bank issued the Prudential Standard on Technology Risk Management in exercise of the powers conferred on it by section 184 of the Banking Act, 2015. The standard comes into effect on . The standard says it should be applied by all regulated licensed financial institutions, Financial Groups and Conglomerates, unless IT is not a significant function or alternative measures of equal effect have been taken.
The standard says the Board of an institution is ultimately responsible for effective oversight of all IT and cybersecurity risks, systems and processes. The standard says that any deviation from it must be explained in a separate document, to be made promptly available to the ECCB on request. The standard says an institution that relies heavily on its IT systems for daily operations should establish a cybersecurity policy based on its risk assessment.
The Eastern Caribbean Central Bank issued the Prudential Standard for Electronic Banking in exercise of the powers conferred on it by section 184 of the Banking Act. Paragraph 6.4 of the standard requires all incident reports and the response to be sent to the Central Bank within 3 days of the occurrence. Paragraph 6.4 of the standard also requires any further update on the incident to be reported to the Central Bank.
Paragraph 5.2.7 of the standard requires formal incident response and management procedures for timely reporting and handling of suspected or actual security breaches, fraud, or service interruptions of e-banking services. Paragraph 5.11.2 of the standard requires an incident response plan to include a clear process for alerting the appropriate regulatory authorities in the event of security breaches or disruptive incidents.
The standard states that institutions found in violation of it are subject to remedial actions specified in section 75 of the Banking Act.
The Eastern Caribbean Central Bank issued the Prudential Standard on Technology Risk Management in exercise of the powers conferred on it by section 184 of the Banking Act, 2015. Paragraph 12.8.1 of the standard provides that within 24 hours of becoming aware of a cyber-incident, an institution shall alert the ECCB and its Information Security User Group that a cyber-incident occurred.
Paragraph 12.8.1 of the standard also says the compromised institution should complete the incident report in Appendix I and submit it to the ECCB within 48 hours of the incident. The standard lists among the responsibilities of Senior Management notifying directly the customers whose accounts were potentially or actually compromised within seventy-two hours of the discovery of the incident.
The standard lists among the responsibilities of Senior Management notifying the general public about a cybersecurity incident only after notifying the ECCB. Paragraph 12.8.4 of the standard provides that an institution shall provide an update on the incident to the ECCB at a frequency determined by the ECCB. Paragraph 12.8.5 of the standard provides that following the resolution of the cyber-incident an institution shall conduct a post-incident review and submit it to the ECCB.
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines has no press-publisher neighbouring right and no mandatory platform-to-publisher bargaining code; the general copyright framework of the Copyright Act, 2003 (Act No. 21 of 2003) is the only law reaching an aggregator's reproduction of news content.
Its fair-dealing provisions permit fair dealing with a work for the purpose of criticism or review or for reporting current events, subject to a sufficient acknowledgement, and section 52 directs a court determining whether a dealing is fair to consider the nature of the work, the extent and substantiality of the part of the work affected, the purpose and character of the use, and the effect of the act on the potential market for or commercial value of the work.
The Act carries no headline-length or short-extract cap distinct from that four-factor test, and no reported Vincentian decision applies it to a systematic news aggregator rather than an individual quoting a published work. Neighbouring rights under the Act protect performers and their recordings, not print or online news publishers, so there is no publisher-side neighbouring right of the kind the European Union's Digital Single Market Directive Article 15 creates.
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 exists. The Act predates the concept of a machine-readable text-and-data-mining reservation, so no opt-out mechanism of that kind exists.
Section 51(1) of the Copyright Act, 2003 (Act No. 21 of 2003) permits fair dealing with a work for the purposes of criticism or review, of that or another work or of a performance, without infringing copyright, provided it is accompanied by a sufficient acknowledgement. Section 51(2) extends a parallel fair-dealing permission, again subject to sufficient acknowledgement, to reporting current events using a protected work other than a photograph.
Section 52 directs a court determining whether a dealing is fair to consider the nature of the work, the extent and substantiality of the part of the work affected, the purpose and character of the use, and the effect of the act on the potential market for or commercial value of the work.
Neighbouring rights under the Act sit in a separate part headed Rights in Performances, covering a performer's rights and the rights of a person holding recording rights, and do not extend to a print or online news publisher's own reporting.
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
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines has no law requiring disclosure that content is AI-generated, labelling of synthetic media or output, or disclosure that a user is interacting with an automated system, and no risk-obligation, training-data, prohibited-practice, governance, or sector-specific AI statute of any kind.
The Cybercrime Act, 2016 (Act No. 20 of 2016) criminalises computer-misuse and a range of electronic-communication offences; the Electronic Transactions Act, 2015 (Act No. 6 of 2015) recognises electronic records and signatures and sets consumer-disclosure duties for electronic commerce; and the Privacy Act, 2003 (Act No. 18 of 2003), which has never come into operation, would regulate personal information held by public authorities. None of the three addresses an AI system as such.
As of .
Privacy law
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines has no comprehensive private-sector data-protection statute and no functioning data-protection supervisory authority. The Privacy Act, 2003 (Act No. 18 of 2003) regulates the collection, holding, use, correction, and disclosure of personal information held by a public authority and establishes the office of Privacy Commissioner. The Act provides for entry into force by Order in the Gazette.
The UWI Data Protection Office states that, as of February 2025, the required commencement order had not been issued. The Act reaches only a public authority, never a private business.
Some compliance trackers describe a further Data Protection Act, 2021 for Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, but the two specialist regional resources that catalogue Caribbean data-protection legislation record only the Privacy Act, 2003 for this jurisdiction, and no official source confirming a 2021 Act is available.
As of .
Age gating law
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines has no adult-content age-verification law, social-media minor-access restriction, app-store age-verification requirement, or age-appropriate design code.
The Cybercrime Act, 2016 (Act No. 20 of 2016) criminalises child pornography as an offence, but the offence runs to the person who creates, distributes, or possesses the material rather than imposing an age-verification or age-gating duty on a service provider, and the Council of Europe's own compliance survey of the Act does not describe any provision reaching that ground.
As of .
Case law
No current case law for Saint Vincent and the Grenadines AI law
No current case law for Saint Vincent and the Grenadines privacy law
No current case law for Saint Vincent and the Grenadines scraping law
No current case law for Saint Vincent and the Grenadines cybersecurity law
No current case law for Saint Vincent and the Grenadines communications law
No current case law for Saint Vincent and the Grenadines content moderation law
No current case law for Saint Vincent and the Grenadines product and AI liability law
No current case law for Saint Vincent and the Grenadines digital accessibility law
No current case law for Saint Vincent and the Grenadines age gating law
No current case law for Saint Vincent and the Grenadines reuse law
Reporting clocks that run here2 instruments
The instruments whose obligation lines set a deadline for reporting an incident, a vulnerability or a personal-data breach, each deadline read from the sentence that carries it and listed shortest first. The law of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines comes first, then the law of the bodies above it that applies here.
Each flag is one law, and a link to it. Read down the scale: the clocks document's time axis, with the empty stretches shortened so the deadlines sit close. Flags on one line set the same duty at the same deadline, and the laws behind them are named to the right, with what each clock counts from.
The deadlines above on one time axis, shortest at the top. The axis keeps its order and, between neighbors, its proportion, but a stretch with no deadline on it is shortened, so the hour marks on the left are what say how far apart two stations really are. Beside each action, the laws that set it, what each counts from, and a status where the law is not yet in force. The List tab has the same data in full, with the sentences.
Within 24 hours of becoming aware of a cyber-incident, alert the ECCB and the Information Security User Group of licensed financial institutions that a cyber-incident occurred (paragraph 12.8.1).
Complete the incident report in Appendix I of the standard and submit it to the ECCB within 48 hours of the incident; the standard states this as 'should' (paragraph 12.8.1 and Appendix I).
Notify directly the customers whose accounts were potentially or actually compromised within seventy-two hours of the discovery of the incident (Senior Management roles, item g).
Send all incident reports and your response to the Central Bank within 3 days of the occurrence, and report any further update on the incident to the Central Bank (paragraph 6.4).
Which of these one incident starts turns on the facts: the incident method works that through. The clocks document draws every clock in the LexLint law library on one axis, with the sentence beside every rung.
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