Text und Data Mining (General Text and Data Mining Exception)
Urheberrechtsgesetz (UrhG), § 44b
A citation is an address, not a summary. The first part names the law; what follows narrows it to the exact section, article or paragraph.
In force.
A copyright and text and data mining (TDM) rule binding public and private bodies.
As of 6 September 2026.
What it requires
- May reproduce lawfully accessible works for text and data mining, but must delete the reproduction once it is no longer needed for that purpose.
- Do not disregard a rightsholder's machine-readable reservation of rights over a work accessible online; a reservation made only in natural language is not effective.
What this law does
Drafted with AI from the cited sources under the direction of UnGovr staff. UnGovr holds editorial responsibility for this page.
Text and data mining is defined as the automated analysis of one or more digital or digitised works to derive information, in particular about patterns, trends and correlations. Reproducing lawfully accessible works for text and data mining is permitted, and the reproduction must be deleted once it is no longer needed for that purpose.
This use is permitted only if the rightsholder has not reserved it, and a reservation over a work accessible online is effective only if made in machine-readable form.
This is Germany's transposition of the EU text-and-data-mining exception and its opt-out mechanism, applicable to AI-model training and other automated collection of lawfully accessible text and data, including web-scraped content, and it is expressly extended to the sui generis database right by the database-right provision's own limitations clause.
When LexLint raises it
crawls_webtrains_models
Read the law
official consolidated Urheberrechtsgesetz text, gesetze-im-internet.de