IrelandText and Data Mining Exceptions, Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000 ss. 53A-53B
European Union (Copyright and Related Rights in the Digital Single Market) Regulations 2021 (S.I. No. 567 of 2021) regs. 3-4, inserting and amending ss. 53A and 53B of the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000
In force since .
A copyright and text and data mining (TDM) rule binding public and private bodies.
- Private right of action
- No
- Audit expectation
- none
What it requires
- A commercial text-and-data-mining reproduction or extraction from a work you have lawful access to is permitted unless the rightholder has expressly reserved that use: in machine-readable form for content made available online, or clearly communicated to all persons with lawful access for other content (s. 53B(1), (3)).
- A reproduction made under the research and non-commercial text-and-data-mining exception must be stored in a secure manner appropriate to the work, and may be retained for the purposes of research, including verification of results (s. 53A(3A)).
- A contractual term that overrides the section 53A text-and-data-mining exception is unenforceable.
These lines are LexLint's reading of the law's text.
Who enforces it
Settledness
A request for a preliminary ruling lodged on (Case C-250/25, Like Company v Google Ireland) asks whether reproduction of lawfully accessible works to train an LLM-based chatbot falls within the text and data mining exception in Article 4 of Directive 2019/790.
- As of
- Open questions
- Does a robots.txt directive count as a reservation that 'is machine-readable' for 'content made publicly available online' under section 53B(3)?
- Are the 'terms and conditions of a website or a service' a machine-readable reservation under section 53B(3) when they are written in prose and carry no machine-readable signal?
What it makes you log
Logging duty
Regulations 3 and 4 insert Sections 53A and 53B, which allow text and data mining copies subject to the author's reservation and to security conditions on stored copies. Section 53A(3C) entitles the author to be told a copy was made and to ask what security steps the person responsible took, which is an entitlement to information and does not require a log or record to be kept.
- Kind
- None
- As of
What this law does
The 2021 Regulations added a new section 53B to the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000: where a rightholder has not expressly reserved, in an appropriate manner, the use of a work for reproduction or extraction for the purposes of text and data mining, a person who has lawful access to the work may reproduce it for that purpose, and may retain the reproduction for as long as necessary for the mining.
The section named the author until Statutory Instrument 469 of 2026, made on , substituted 'a rightholder' for 'an author' in section 53B(1) and (3). A reservation is made in an appropriate manner where it is machine-readable, for content made publicly available online, including in the metadata or terms and conditions of a website or service, and, for content not made publicly available online, where it is clearly communicated to all persons with lawful access.
The Regulations also amended the pre-existing research and non-commercial text-and-data-mining exception at section 53A by inserting new subsections requiring that a copy made under it be stored securely and permitting it to be retained for the purposes of research, including for verification of research results, and by providing that any contractual provision contrary to the section is unenforceable. A parallel exception for computer programs was inserted at section 82(3)-(5). A parallel exception for subject matter protected by related rights was inserted after section 225A as section 225AA.
When LexLint raises it
When your app profile says your app crawls the web or trains models.
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