Höfundalög

Höfundalög — literally “the author law” — is the principal Icelandic copyright statute. Originally enacted in 1972, it has been amended periodically, most substantively in 2000 (transposing the EU InfoSoc Directive 2001/29/EC under the EEA Agreement) and 2018 (incorporating the EU Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive’s earlier amendments). The substantive copyright protections it grants — economic and moral rights of authors, term of protection, exhaustion doctrine, exceptions for quotation, parody, and education — are broadly comparable to those of any EEA member state.

What the statute does not contain is a transposition of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s notice-and-takedown procedure. The EU E-Commerce Directive 2000/31/EC, which Iceland imports through the EEA Agreement, supplies the closest equivalent — the safe-harbour regime for hosting providers — but the EU directive’s procedural surface is significantly thinner than the DMCA’s. There is no Icelandic equivalent of the DMCA Section 512 affidavit, no equivalent of a DMCA agent registration with the Icelandic copyright authority, and no equivalent of the DMCA’s prescribed counter-notice timeline.

The practical consequence for an offshore-hosting operator is that DMCA-format takedown notices have no procedural standing in Icelandic law. A complainant who wishes to compel removal of content hosted in Iceland must proceed under the substantive provisions of Höfundalög, which means a civil action and a court order — not a self-service form. OffshorePress states this explicitly in the acceptable use policy and in the Iceland jurisdictional dossier: the operator does not process DMCA-format notices, because the law of the operating jurisdiction does not require it to.