Venezuela

Summary

Venezuela presents an unclear legal environment for web crawling. The Ley Especial contra los Delitos Informáticos (LECDI, 2001) Art. 6 criminalises "acceso indebido" — accessing a system without authorisation or in excess of authorisation — with penalties of 1-5 years imprisonment. The statute predates modern web practices and has not been tested on public-page scraping; the paradigm case is intrusion into secured systems. Venezuela has no comprehensive data-protection law; privacy rights derive from constitutional Arts. 28 (habeas data) and 60, enforced by courts via amparo rather than by a dedicated regulator. IAPP and Baker McKenzie confirm absence of a dedicated data protection authority (as of 2024-2025). A National Cybersecurity Council was created by executive decree on August 12, 2024 (confirmed by Bentata Law Firm and BitFinance), with an advisory role and 13 powers including surveillance of telematic incidents and ability to compel data from companies — but no defined enforcement mandate over data-protection or crawling. Copyright is governed by the Ley sobre el Derecho de Autor (1993), which has a narrow closed list of exceptions and no TDM carve-out. No sui generis database right. State-control of the internet and practical rule-of-law concerns make reliable legal analysis difficult; practical enforcement patterns are unpredictable. Overall risk is elevated by legal uncertainty and governance context rather than by specific anti-scraping provisions.