Austria
AI behavior law: bot and agent disclosure, crawler and training-data rules, automated-agent transactions, and algorithmic decision-making.
Summary
Austria follows the EU framework closely. StGB §118a criminalises unauthorised access to computer systems but requires a specially secured system — publicly accessible pages with no technical barrier carry no §118a risk. Austria transposed the DSM Directive via the Urheberrechts-Novelle 2021 (BGBl. I Nr. 244/2021), adding UrhG §42h (research TDM) and §42i (general/commercial TDM with machine-readable opt-out). A robots.txt or TDMRep reservation is legally effective to opt out of commercial TDM under §42i. Austria has the full EU sui generis database right (UrhG §§76c-76e). GDPR applies with the DSB (Datenschutzbehörde) as supervisory authority. The EU AI Act is binding from August 2025. No scraping-specific case law has been identified in Austrian courts.
Automated-access legality
Carried forward from the crawler-law index. Governs whether automated clients may access public websites in this jurisdiction.
| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Authorization test | security mechanism bypass |
| Public-page carve-out | yes |
| Terms-of-service browsewrap enforceable | notice dependent |
| Terms-of-service clickwrap enforceable | yes |
| Copyright exception model | tdm dual track |
| Text and data mining — commercial status | with optout |
| Text and data mining — opt-out mechanism | robots txt |
| robots.txt legal weight | evidentiary |
| AI training-specific law | binding |
| Privacy regime | GDPR |
| Trespass to chattels | not recognized |
Last reviewed: 2026-05-23. Confidence: medium. Fast-moving area — verify before relying. Not legal advice.