According to Ars Technica, Meta has “streamlined” its commercial terms of service in a way that may allow it to access and use content from websites linked to business accounts. The update is scheduled to take effect on October 30 and would not allow businesses to opt out, Ars Technica reports.
The change has drawn concern from legal experts because the terms authorize Meta, or entities acting on its behalf, to use automated software such as scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers and user agents. The software could access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve or crawl domains, web pages and URLs associated with a business’s products or services, and periodically pull updates from them.
The terms also say Meta may use content from those domains, pages or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train and maintain the integrity of Meta products, services and features. Ars Technica notes that the language does not mention AI directly. The connection to AI training is inferred from the single use of “train,” along with the references to automated scraping and crawling.
Why news publishers are watching
The update would affect all business accounts, according to Ars Technica’s account of reporting from Nieman Lab. That is particularly significant for news publishers, which could potentially charge Meta millions of dollars in licensing fees to continually access their articles for AI training.
News organizations are currently fighting a battle with OpenAI over whether training without licensing qualifies as fair use. Ars Technica reports that Meta’s terms seemingly risk granting the company sweeping permissions regardless of how that legal dispute is resolved.
Nieman Lab said that virtually every news organization has at least one Meta business account, including Nieman Lab itself. Its statement also said journalism is not the only industry affected by the update.
Three legal experts told Nieman Lab that it is not clear whether a court would enforce the terms. They said the language could be used to argue that Meta can scrape content from news sites and use it to train its AI products. James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, said Meta could “train AI on any content from their sites” and possibly “deploy some of that content, even in competition with the publishers themselves” on Meta platforms.
Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy, told Nieman Lab that “this is a remarkable provision to bury in [the] terms of service, given that this would give Meta access to material that would likely cost many millions of dollars in a licensing market.”
Meta’s response
Meta’s position is that the update does not change its web-crawling practices. A spokesperson told Ars Technica that “there is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false.”
A Meta spokesperson also told Nieman Lab that the company has no plans to use the terms as a legal basis to ignore robots.txt instructions that block scraping on news sites. The company still allows news organizations to opt out of scraping and provides instructions on how to block crawling.
The unresolved question is how the terms could be interpreted if courts affirm that AI training on non-news articles is fair use. News organizations question whether Meta’s stance might change in that situation, and whether the terms could be used to override robots.txt instructions.
Ars Technica also reports that Meta has begun charging users to post links on its platforms. Against that backdrop, the terms appear to give Meta a possible path to charge publishers for sharing links and then use that program to claim permission to scrape those links for AI training. Whether a court would enforce that interpretation remains unclear.