Text and Data Mining for Non-Commercial Research

Section 29A permits a person with lawful access to a work to make a copy of it for computational analysis, without infringing copyright, but only where the copy is made so that a person with lawful access can carry out that analysis for the sole purpose of non-commercial research, and the copy carries a sufficient acknowledgement.

The copy becomes an infringing copy if it is transferred to anyone else, other than with the copyright owner's authorisation, or used for any purpose beyond that non-commercial research purpose. A contract term purporting to prevent or restrict the making of a copy that this section would otherwise permit is unenforceable.

Because the exception is limited to non-commercial research, crawling third-party websites to collect training data for a commercial AI model does not fall within it, and depends instead on a licence or the rights holder's consent under the general copyright framework.

The government's Report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, published 18 March 2026 following its 2024-25 consultation, stated that a broad text-and-data-mining exception with a machine-readable opt-out is no longer the government's preferred way forward, so the position described here is expected to remain the status quo for the near term.