# Text and Data Mining Reservation Protocol TDMRep

[3 · Permit](/category/permit/)

| Text and Data Mining Reservation Protocol |
| --- |
| Category | [Permit](/category/permit/) |
| Governed by | W3C Text and Data Mining Reservation Protocol Community Group |
| Status | W3C Community Group Final Report; explicitly "not a W3C Standard nor is it on the W3C Standards Track" |
| Phase | stable |
| Implementation | unknown |
| Adoption | unmeasured |
| Version | CG-FINAL-tdmrep-20240510 (2024-05-10) |
| Specification | [https://www.w3.org/community/reports/tdmrep/CG-FINAL-tdmrep-20240510/](https://www.w3.org/community/reports/tdmrep/CG-FINAL-tdmrep-20240510/) |
| Found at | /.well-known/tdmrep.json |
| Last checked | 2026-09-06 |

[Permit](/category/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]](#ref-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]](#ref-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]](#ref-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]](#ref-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](/mcp/server-card): 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
- 2026-09-05 — seeded from Exa Agent research run
- 2026-09-06 — verified against w3.org/community/reports/tdmrep/CG-FINAL-tdmrep-20240510/

## Instances

- [SleekNova](https://sleeknova.com/tdm-policy/) · Observed 2026-09-04 · business
- [STM Association members (French newspapers, trade publishers)](https://stm-assoc.org/eu-commissions-consultation-on-tdm-rights-reservation-protocols/) · Observed 2026-06-15 · network
- [Springer Nature](https://www.springernature.com) · Observed 2026-06-15 · business
- [Elsevier](https://www.elsevier.com) · Observed 2026-06-15 · business
- [Mapsoft PDF Hub](https://mapsoft.com/posts/ai-training-opt-out-publishers.html) · Observed 2026-05-02 · service
- [STM Association](https://stm-assoc.org/document/stm-tdm-reservation-protocol-tdmrep-publisher-implementation-testimonial/) · Observed 2026-03-18 · network

Every instance with its source is listed on the [instances page](/instances/).

## See also

## References

- 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/](https://www.w3.org/community/reports/tdmrep/CG-FINAL-tdmrep-20240510/) (2024-05-10) VERIFIED
- 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/](https://www.w3.org/community/tdmrep/) VERIFIED

[JSON](/data/protocols/tdmrep.json) · [Markdown](/protocols/tdmrep/index.md)