Law note · European Union

DSM Directive, Article 4 (text-and-data-mining exception and rights reservation)

Citation	Directive (EU) 2019/790, Article 4
Status	In effect
In force	2021-06-07
Reviewed	as of 2026-08-14

Article 4 requires Member States to provide an exception or limitation for reproductions and extractions of lawfully accessible works for the purposes of text and data mining, and paragraph 2 permits retaining those copies for as long as the mining requires. Unlike the Article 3 exception, which is confined to research organisations and cultural heritage institutions acting for scientific research, Article 4 is limited by neither purpose nor actor, and recital 18 records that mining techniques are widely used by private and public entities alike, including for the development of new applications and technologies. Paragraph 3 makes the exception conditional on the rightholder not having expressly reserved the use in an appropriate manner, which the Article illustrates as machine-readable means for content made publicly available online, so a reservation removes the exception rather than merely signalling a preference. Article 7(1) renders contractual override unenforceable for Articles 3, 5 and 6 but does not list Article 4.

What it asks of an app

• Check for machine-readable rights reservations (robots directives, metadata, terms) before mining or training on EU-accessible content
• Skip or license content whose rights holder has opted out
• Mine only content you access lawfully in the first place

When LexLint raises it

Declared activities: crawls_web, trains_models

Primary source: official consolidated Official Journal text, EUR-Lex

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