This is a legal and architecture question, not a "how do I scrape a bank" question. At Landvex we need a reference library and training material for document review in Europe: layouts, issuer markers, typical fields. Not customer files.
I'm trying to understand where the lines really are, because the folklore around "if it's on a public website we can train on it" seems… optimistic!?
Points I'd like to hear how other teams have handled, ideally with something more concrete than vibes:
- Official specimen pages and published examples. Some government or document libraries explicitly forbid reuse in a product. Does "I only extract layout features or embeddings, I don't ship the images" change anything, or is that wishful thinking?
- Copyright in the look of a bank statement or an employment certificate template. Who even owns that, and does it matter if the model never reproduces a full page?
- Training on customer-submitted documents, even with a contract. Purpose limitation, storage limitation, the right to erasure — can a model trained on someone's statement ever really forget them?
- Synthetic data generated to resemble a real issuer's layout. Is imitating a protected template for training its own problem?
- Keeping an audit trail: source, date fetched, licence, whether personal data was present, and a way to drop an item from future training runs if the legal basis disappears.
I'm not asking anyone to be our lawyer, and I'm not looking for ways around terms of service. I want to hear how people have designed the corpus so a later audit doesn't fall apart.
What did you decide you would not train on, and why?
