Question 1

What is TDMR (a TDM reservation)?

Accepted Answer

TDMR is a machine-readable TDM reservation (W3C TDMRep / EU DSM Art. 4 opt-out). When present it reserves text-and-data-mining and AI rights — AIScrapeSafe honors it as authoritative.

Question 2

What is TDM compliance, and who needs it?

Accepted Answer

TDM compliance means being able to show that text-and-data-mining of a source respected the rights reserved on it. It matters most to teams building or training on web data who will face an audit, a regulator, or a customer security review. The practical test isn't "did you mine it" but "can you produce a record of the rights you checked first."

Question 3

What is the EU TDM exception and the TDMR opt-out?

Accepted Answer

The EU's DSM Copyright Directive (2019/790) created two TDM exceptions. Article 3 covers research organizations and can't be overridden. Article 4 covers general and commercial TDM but lets rightsholders reserve their rights in a machine-readable way. That reservation is a TDMR (a TDM reservation); if a site expresses one, Article 4 mining is off the table unless you have other permission.

Question 4

How do I prove TDM due diligence to an auditor?

Accepted Answer

Auditors want a reproducible record, not a memory. For each source you mined you need the rights you checked, the signal each came from, when you checked, and the verdict. AIScrapeSafe produces that as a registered, re-validatable record so the evidence survives long after the crawl. It's documentation of a good-faith, systematic process, not legal advice.

Question 5

Is text and data mining legal in the United States?

Accepted Answer

The US has no dedicated TDM exception like the EU's. TDM tends to be argued under fair use, which is fact-specific and actively contested in current AI-copyright litigation, so there's no blanket yes or no. The defensible move is to check and record the rights expressed on each source rather than assume. This is general information, not legal advice.

Question 6

What's the difference between a TDM reservation and robots.txt?

Accepted Answer

robots.txt tells crawlers which paths they may fetch; it's an access convention, not a rights mechanism. A TDM reservation (TDMR) is a rights signal that reserves text-and-data-mining rights under EU Article 4. A site can let you crawl in robots.txt yet still reserve TDM rights, so respecting robots.txt alone doesn't clear you to mine.

Question 7

How does AIScrapeSafe record a TDM-rights verdict?

Accepted Answer

Point it at a URL and AIScrapeSafe returns a per-right verdict that includes tdm, with the signals examined and the source of each. When the signals don't agree or a reservation can't be read, tdm stays restricted or unknown; it's never upgraded to allowed. Register the verdict and you get a stable record you can re-validate and hand to an auditor.

TDM & TDMR