TDMRep — agent readiness

Why an agent cares

It is the mechanism EU copyright law points at for reserving text and data mining rights, so for publishers it carries legal weight the others do not. A malformed tdmrep.json reserves nothing, which is the failure mode worth catching.

Adoption

Early production. Several independent organisations run it in production, though it is still niche on the open web.

Direction of travel: ▲ rising, as at 2026-07-28.

The strongest genuine opt-out adoption: the W3C adopters register lists 30+ STM publishers plus trade publishers, hosting platforms and French newspapers, driven by EU regulation.

Adopter	Depth
Elsevier, Springer Nature, IEEE, Sage, Taylor & Francis, ACS and ~25 more	`production`
Hachette Livre, Mondadori, Penguin Random House Spain and Germany	`production`
Atypon, HighWire, Bookwire, Cairn.info, Edigita (platform opt-in)	`production`
Les Echos, Le Parisien, Ouest-France, Radio France, Sud Ouest	`production`

All of the above are recorded in the same place: github.com.

What we check

Absence is never a finding. Every check below runs only when this technology is detected, so a site that has not adopted this is not assessed on it and appears in no report. 5 of these 5 can fail it. In Lumar these appear once per site, in the site-wide results of each crawl.

Check	Severity	Raises	On whose authority
TDMRep Malformed Document	high	conformance, usability	specification: W3C TDM Reservation Protocol
Supporting documents: W3C TDM Reservation Protocol Required by W3C TDM Reservation Protocol. Bad: the file isn't a JSON array of rules as the spec requires, so no reservation is readable. Fix: serve an array, e.g. [{"location": "/", "tdm-reservation": 1}].
TDMRep Invalid Reservation	high	conformance, usability	specification: W3C TDM Reservation Protocol
Supporting documents: W3C TDM Reservation Protocol Required by W3C TDM Reservation Protocol. Bad: "tdm-reservation" isn't the number 0 or 1 (a quoted "1", another number, or a missing value is a protocol error), so the opt-out can't be interpreted. Fix: set the bare number 1 (reserved) or 0 (not reserved), unquoted.
TDMRep Missing Location	medium	conformance, usability	specification: W3C TDM Reservation Protocol
Supporting documents: W3C TDM Reservation Protocol Required by W3C TDM Reservation Protocol. Bad: a rule omits its required "location" pattern, so agents can't tell which URLs the reservation covers. Fix: add a location to every rule ("/" covers the whole site).
TDMRep Invalid Policy	medium	conformance, usability	specification: W3C TDM Reservation Protocol
Supporting documents: W3C TDM Reservation Protocol Required by W3C TDM Reservation Protocol. Bad: a "tdm-policy" is present but isn't an absolute http(s) URL, so agents can't fetch the licensing policy it points to. Fix: use the policy page's full URL.
TDMRep Insecure Policy	low	usability, security (CWE-319)	Lumar readiness bar, beyond W3C TDM Reservation Protocol
Supporting documents: W3C TDM Reservation Protocol Lumar readiness bar: no specification requires this. Provisional security check; precision has not yet been measured. Bad: a rule's tdm-policy links a plain http:// URL, so the licence terms an agent is asked to honour can be altered on the way. A Lumar bar: TDMRep allows any URL. Fix: serve the policy over https and link "tdm-policy": "https://example.com/tdm-policy.json". An advertised HTTP destination permits unencrypted communication. OWASP API API8 (2023) — Security Misconfiguration ASVS V12.2.1 (5.0.0) — TLS for external HTTP services Only advertised transport configuration is observed; API deployment security is not fully assessed. Related guidance does not establish exploitation or framework compliance. Security checks are provisional.

Examples

Both run through the same checks as a live scan: the first passes, the second is flagged.

correctjson

[
  { "location": "/", "tdm-reservation": 1, "tdm-policy": "https://example.com/tdm-policy.json" },
  { "location": "/blog/", "tdm-reservation": 1 },
  { "location": "/press-releases/", "tdm-reservation": 0 }
]

present but wrongjson

[
  { "tdm-reservation": 1 },
  { "location": "/blog/", "tdm-reservation": "1" },
  { "location": "/docs/", "tdm-reservation": 1, "tdm-policy": "/policies/tdm" },
  { "location": "/media/", "tdm-reservation": 1, "tdm-policy": "http://example.com/policies/tdm.json" }
]

Specifications

Document	Revision	Kind
W3C TDM Reservation Protocol	Final report, 10 May 2024	specification

Last re-read against the published documents: 2026-09-27.