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Text and Data Mining Reservation Protocol TDMRep

Permit TDMRep (Text and Data Mining Reservation Protocol) is a W3C Community Group Final Report, published 2024-05-10, defining a protocol for rights holders to reserve text-and-data-mining rights over otherwise lawfully accessible web content, and to make any TDM licensing policy discoverable [1]. It was created as a technical response to Article 4 of the EU Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, which lets rights holders opt out of the TDM exception by an 'appropriate' machine-readable means [1].

Overview

The spec defines a tdm-reservation declaration (1 = reserved, 0 = not reserved) and an optional tdm-policy pointing to a JSON-LD policy document, attachable four ways: a /.well-known/tdmrep.json file at the origin, an HTTP TDM-Reservation/TDM-Policy response header, or embedded metadata inside HTML, EPUB 2/3, or PDF files, with a defined processing-priority order across these surfaces when more than one is present [1]. The policy document format can express permission scope (research vs. non-research mining), a duty to contact the rights holder, and a duty to compensate financially.

It does not define an enforcement or authorization mechanism — like robots.txt, a reservation is a signal a crawler may honour or ignore — and it does not define payment rails for the compensation duty it lets a policy express. It is not on the W3C Standards Track; the report itself says so explicitly, and under the W3C Community Final Specification Agreement, different (weaker) patent and process commitments apply than for a Recommendation [1].

As of this verification (2026-09-06), the CG-FINAL-tdmrep-20240510 report confirms the prior finding of a 2024-05-10 final date, and no successor draft was found during this pass — the Community Group appears to have concluded its work with this final report. Governance now sits with the W3C TDMRep Community Group (public-tdmrep@w3.org mailing list, GitHub issues preferred for discussion) rather than an active working group.

What is unresolved: this verification did not independently confirm which publishers or crawlers implement /.well-known/tdmrep.json in production; adoption is unmeasured rather than known-zero, and a dedicated probe run against a domain sample would be needed to move this to 'measured'. It is also unresolved how TDMRep's EU-directive-specific framing interacts with the more general-purpose, non-EU-specific AIPREF and Content Signals conventions that address overlapping ground.

Discovery and probe

well-known file, HTTP response header, or embedded metadata in HTML/EPUB/PDF · /.well-known/tdmrep.json

GET {origin}/.well-known/tdmrep.json
parse:     Presence of a tdm-reservation or tdm-policy field in the returned JSON, or equivalently in the TDM-Reservation/TDM-Policy HTTP headers on the resource
on absent: No TDM reservation file at the well-known path; check per-resource HTTP headers and embedded metadata before concluding no reservation exists, per the spec's own processing-priority rules

Live check run by the MCP probe: GET /.well-known/tdmrep.json. A TDMRep file carries tdm-reservation or tdm-policy fields.

{
 "path": "/.well-known/tdmrep.json",
 "expect": {
  "content_type": "json",
  "text_match": "tdm-reservation|tdm-policy"
 },
 "note": "A TDMRep file carries tdm-reservation or tdm-policy fields."
}

History

Instances

Every instance with its source is listed on the instances page.

See also

References

  1. The CG-FINAL report published 2024-05-10 defines the tdm-reservation and tdm-policy declarations, the /.well-known/tdmrep.json file, HTTP header, and embedded-metadata attachment surfaces, and states plainly it is a Community Group report, not a W3C Standard. — https://www.w3.org/community/reports/tdmrep/CG-FINAL-tdmrep-20240510/ (2024-05-10) VERIFIED
  2. The TDM Reservation Protocol Community Group's own charter page confirms the group's goal (a simple, practical machine-readable TDM rights-reservation solution) and links the same CG-FINAL report as its output, independently corroborating the spec's existence and governance body from a second W3C-hosted page distinct from the report itself. — https://www.w3.org/community/tdmrep/ VERIFIED

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