Venezuela

Article 28 gives every person the right to access information and data concerning themselves or their property held in official or private registries, to know the use made of it and its purpose, and to ask the competent court for its update, correction, or destruction where it is erroneous or illegitimately affects their rights; it also protects the confidentiality of journalistic and other professional sources the law names.

Article 60 protects every person's honor, private life, intimacy, own image, confidentiality, and reputation, and directs that the law limit the use of informatics to guarantee the honor and personal and family intimacy of citizens and the full exercise of their rights.

Article 20 punishes anyone who intentionally appropriates, uses, modifies, or deletes, by any means and without the owner's consent, another person's personal data or information, or data in which they have a legitimate interest, held in a computer or system that uses information technology, with the penalty increased by a third to a half if the conduct causes harm to the data's holder or a third party.

Article 21 separately punishes accessing, capturing, intercepting, interfering with, reproducing, modifying, diverting, or deleting another person's data message or transmission or communication signal through the use of information technology.

Article 22 punishes revealing, disseminating, or transferring, in whole or in part, the facts discovered, images, audio, or data or information obtained through the conduct articles 20 and 21 describe, with a heavier penalty where the disclosure was for profit or caused harm to another. No dedicated data-protection supervisory authority exists; these criminal offences are the operative statutory sanction for a privacy violation in the absence of a civil regime.

Article 6 punishes any person who, without due authorization or exceeding the authorization obtained, accesses, intercepts, interferes with, or uses a system that uses information technology. Article 7 punishes intentionally destroying, damaging, modifying, or otherwise altering or disabling such a system or its data, with a heavier penalty where a virus or similar program is used, and article 8 reduces the penalty by half to two-thirds where the same conduct is merely negligent.

Article 9 raises every penalty in this chapter by a third to a half where the system affected is protected by security measures, serves a public function, or holds personal or patrimonial data of a natural or legal person.

Article 10 punishes importing, manufacturing, distributing, selling, or using equipment or programs meant to defeat a system's security, or offering services to that end, and article 11 separately punishes improperly obtaining, revealing, or disseminating data or information held in a system, with the penalty raised where done for profit or where it endangers state security or an affected institution's reliability.

Article 6 is the offence framed on acting without due authorization or exceeding the authorization obtained. Article 7 turns on intent to destroy, damage, modify or disable a system or its data, and states no authorization element. Article 10 turns on the purpose of defeating or removing a system's security, and states no authorization element. Article 11 turns on obtaining, revealing or disseminating a system's data or information improperly (indebidamente).

No provision, and no reported Venezuelan decision, addresses whether reading a public, unauthenticated page falls within the authorization requirement of article 6. Article 32 brings the Law into force thirty days after its publication in the Gaceta Oficial. No notice stating the day the Law came into force has been located.

Article 3 protects an anthology or compilation of diverse works, and a database, as a work distinct from an original work, where the selection or arrangement of its contents constitutes a personal creation, so protection attaches to the compiler's selection or arrangement rather than to the underlying data itself; the law confers no separate sui generis right over a database's contents.

Article 4 excludes the text of laws, decrees, official regulations, public treaties, judicial decisions, and other official acts from protection. Article 40(8) treats public access to a computer database by telecommunication as an act of public communication requiring the rightholder's authorization where the database incorporates or constitutes protected works.

Article 44(3) permits reproducing, for non-profit teaching or examinations at educational institutions, articles, brief extracts of works, or lawfully published short works, provided the use conforms to fair practice; the statute contains no text-and-data-mining exception or machine-readable opt-out mechanism. The Law was published in the Gaceta Oficial de la República de Venezuela, Extraordinario issue 4.638, dated 1 October 1993.

Under article 1 of the Código Civil, a law is binding from its publication in the Gaceta Oficial or from a later date that it names itself.

Article 23 punishes anyone who, through any medium involving the use of information technology, exhibits, disseminates, transmits, or sells pornographic material or material reserved to adults, without first giving the due warnings for the user to restrict access by children and adolescents. The duty is a warning requirement rather than a specified verification or age-gating mechanism, and the statute does not describe what form the warning must take.

Article 46(2) permits quoting determinate parts of a work already disclosed, within an original work in which the author has used language as a medium of expression, provided the author's name and the source are clearly indicated. Article 47(1) permits, on the same attribution condition, the full broadcast by press or radio of speeches given at public assemblies, meetings, ceremonies, or public debates before national, state, or municipal authorities.

Article 47(2) separately permits the dissemination by press or broadcast of current articles on economic, social, artistic, political, or religious matters published in periodicals or magazines, unless their reproduction was expressly reserved, including in the form of a press review.

Article 48 separately declares lawful the reproduction of the news of the day or of miscellaneous facts having the character of mere press information, published by the press or by broadcasting, so long as they do not constitute works of ingenuity by their form, without prejudice to the principles governing unfair competition.

Article 49 permits, for reporting on current events by broadcasting or cinematography, broadcasting or recording brief fragments of works that become perceptible during the events the report concerns. Only article 49 carries a length limit, confining what may be broadcast or recorded to brief fragments of works (breves fragmentos de obras) that become perceptible during the events a current-events report concerns.

The exceptions in articles 46(2), 47 and 48 state no headline-length or short-extract cap, and none of them is confined to a defined press industry. Whether any reaches a systematic aggregator's reproduction of headlines and snippets, as against a traditional press review or a broadcaster's current-events report, has not been tested in a located Venezuelan decision.

Venezuela has no separate press-publisher neighbouring right, no compelled platform-to-publisher bargaining regime, no recognized hot-news or misappropriation doctrine distinct from ordinary copyright and unfair-competition law, and no located case law on hyperlinking or framed display. The Law was published in the Gaceta Oficial de la República de Venezuela, Extraordinario issue 4.638, dated 1 October 1993.

Under article 1 of the Código Civil, a law is binding from its publication in the Gaceta Oficial or from a later date that it names itself.