Knowledgebase

AI continues to grow in scope and power, and it's important to protect your documents from AI models that can search and use your information via Text and Data Mining (TDM). This article details how to add machine-readable language to PDFs that can clarify to TDM users that rights are reserved for PDF content, inform TDM users on the legal process for accessing and using the content of PDFs (including rights clearance and compensation where required), or make documents opt-out entirely from having machines search their content.

This can be done with the TDM Reservation Protocol (TDMRep) to define an “opt-out” mechanism for text and data mining (TDM). It determines whether specific content is permitted to be searched or mined for TDM purposes, and how the rights holders can be contacted to obtain a license for such use. You can view the most recent version of the TDM here.

TDMRep’s rights reservation model has two properties:

• tdm-reservation (boolean) indicates if mining rights are reserved or not.
• tdm-policy (URL) gives access to publishers’ contact information and conditions for obtaining authorization to mine content. This property is optional, but leaving it out may render the mechanism ineffective.

PDF authors can add these properties to the XMP metadata of PDFs to indicate a reservation of rights, and to provide a pathway for obtaining a license for text and data mining (TDM) access. 

TDM Policies

TDM policies are in JSON-LD (JSON for Linked Data) format and use standard terminology from ODRL (Open Digital Rights Language), a proposed language for the standardization of digital rights management.

The required properties for the JSON structure are detailed below:

• @context: an array of two values, specifically “http://www.w3.org/ns/odrl.jsonld” and “http://www.w3.org/ns/tdmrep.jsonld”
• uid: an identifier for the policy, expressed as a URI. It is not required that this link references a publicly accessible resource, but it is encouraged. W3C makes the recommendation to link to the website’s human-readable Terms of Use.
• @type: The value of this property must be “Offer”. Offers are “proposals from Rights Holders for specific Rights over their Assets."
• profile: The value of this property must be “http://www.w3.org/ns/tdmrep”.
• assigner: This property contains a set of child vCard properties for contacting the rights holder. It is not required that all of these vCard properties are used, but if any are used then they must be within the list provided by section 7.1.4 of the TDMRep spec, as detailed here.
• permission: an array of permissions. This array only has one required element -“action”: “tdm:mine” - which expresses that the permission to be defined in this policy is to “analyse, via automated analytical technique, text and data in digital form in order to generate information that includes but is not limited to patterns, trends and correlations”. Please note that a “duty” element is also listed here, which expresses the TDM actor’s duty to “obtain verifiable consent”. The spec doesn’t explicitly state that this element is required, but it seems important enough to warrant a strong recommendation.

Adding TDM Reservation Protocols with PDF-XChange Editor

There are two methods that can be used to add TDM Reservation protocols with PDF-XChange Editor:

1. Add the file located here to the %appdata%\Tracker Software\PDFXEditor\3.0\XMP\Custom File Info Panels folder.
2. Open PDF-XChange Editor and go to File → Document Properties → Description → Additional Metadata.
3. Move to the TDM Reservation Protocol and use the options there to specify that the document has a TDM reservation, and provide the URL at which the policy is located.

The second method is intended for use in cases where you need to apply a TDM Reservation protocol to multiple documents. This can be done using a metadata template:

1. Create a metadata template, for example with the file located here.
2. Update the template to provide the URL to your policy file.
3. Place the file in the %appdata%"\Tracker Software\PDFXEditor\3.0\XMP\Metadata Templates folder.
4. Apply the file to documents via the  File → Document Properties → Description → Additional Metadata → Advanced popup menu in the Document Metadata dialog box: