Meta's new business terms let it scrape linked news sites to train AI, legal experts say

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Meta's new business terms let it scrape linked news sites to train AI, legal experts say

Starting October 30, business accounts on Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp consent to Meta scraping websites associated with them, and Meta's terms say the collected content can be used to train its AI products.
Three legal experts who reviewed the terms for Nieman Lab said the language could be read to let Meta train AI on news site content and even deploy it in competition with the publishers themselves.
Matt Topic, an attorney at Loevy & Loevy, said publishers should assume the clause is enforceable, even though it is unclear whether a court would enforce it.
Meta announced the update in early October through a blog post and Meta Business Suite, and business accounts have no way to opt out before October 30.

Hacker News opinions

Next level legal judo here. Say what you want about the metaverse, but Meta's Terms of Service team is clearly still shipping.

Honestly the scariest engineers are the financial and legal ones.

I don't use Facebook much, but last time I logged in I got turned into a business account and I can't change it back.

One could argue the best move for an engineer who hates this is to work there and be a monkey wrench. Be competent enough not to get fired, make them pay for your headcount, and deliver as little as possible.

I'm not a lawyer, but I can't see how a court would enforce this unconscionable term in a clickwrap license.

Wild that courts treat clicking accept without reading as a binding contract in the first place.

In Meta's defense, I don't think you need a business's consent to scrape their website.

No, but you do if you want to rebroadcast content they made themselves. With consent, the business can't later file a copyright complaint over AI output.

I've blocked Meta's crawler for a long time. They hide it behind Facebook browser user agents, and I know it's fake because thousands of Facebook users in Ireland have no reason to care about my small Canadian shop.

I don't really get the legal theory. Why assume the business owns the content it puts on its site? Publishers license third-party material all the time under terms that don't allow sublicensing.