TDMRep (W3C Community Group)

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W3C Community Group report for expressing text and data mining rights reservations and policy links, designed to support the EU DSM Directive's Article 4 mechanism.

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Website
w3.org/community/tdmrep
Latest tracked evidence
Oct 01, 2025Community group notes outline 2025 alignment work with AI-Pref
Last checked
Jul 15, 2026
Profile updated
Jul 15, 2026
Primary approach
Preference signal
Practical force
Voluntary signalIt only affects actors that detect and honor the signal; it does not itself prevent reuse.
Also uses
Formal license
Pipeline
Collect / Train
Status rationale
Publicly available or deployable in the latest catalog review.

Enforcement

Voluntary preference signal. Communicates a requested condition or restriction to automated systems.

It only affects actors that detect and honor the signal; it does not itself prevent reuse.

Catalog status describes public availability, not legal validity, adoption, or proven effectiveness.

What it is

The TDMRep Community Group report defines ways for rightsholders to publish machine-readable text and data mining (TDM) rights reservations and links to licensing policies, including through /.well-known/tdmrep.json. It was developed as a technical response to the EU DSM Directive’s Article 4 mechanism for non-research TDM.

TDMRep (W3C Community Group) publishes or proposes a machine-readable preference signal for web content across the collection and training stages. It also incorporates formal licensing. The signal communicates requested conditions; compliance depends on discovery, interpretation, and voluntary support by downstream systems. Public materials describe a currently available initiative; the newest dated source in this profile is “Community group notes outline 2025 alignment work with AI-Pref” (October 1, 2025). These details describe the published mechanism and evidence, not a finding about legal validity, adoption, or effectiveness.

Limitations

This is a W3C Community Group Final Report, not a W3C Standard or a document on the W3C Standards Track. A reservation is a machine-readable signal, not technical enforcement; its legal effect depends on applicable law and the circumstances of use.

Evidence trail

Adoption signals

No public adoption figure found.

Examples

/.well-known/tdmrep.jsonSource

The W3C report shows a minimal root-level reservation file for a whole site.

[
  {
    "location": "/",
    "tdm-reservation": 1
  }
]
HTML meta tagsSource

The same report also defines page-level HTML metadata for reservation and policy links.

<meta name="tdm-reservation" content="1">
<meta name="tdm-policy" content="https://provider.com/policies/policy.json">