Meta’s AI could still scrape news sites, legal experts say

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Meta has tweaked its business terms to remove language suggesting that it could freely train its AI models on news sites, like The Verge — but legal experts say these changes aren’t enough to address their concerns. “This does nothing to restrict the ‘associated with your products or services’ [language] that would let Meta scrape entire sites,” James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, tells Nieman Lab.

Initially, Meta’s new terms for business accounts appeared to give the company permission to train its AI on news sites. The terms, which go into effect October 30th, stated that Meta “may use any content” from the websites associated with a business account to “develop, research” and “train” Meta’s products. At the time, legal experts told Nieman Lab that this could allow Meta “to argue its commercial terms supersede other blocking instructions,” such as the robots.txt file that has historically told scrapers (including search engines like Google) what they are allowed to crawl.

Following fierce backlash from the publishing industry, Meta removed language saying it would “train” its products with scraped content. But the tweaks might not be enough to rule out that possibility. “The revised version of the new terms still allows Meta to use that scraped content to develop any ‘business product.’ That doesn’t seem to be a defined term, and presumably Meta is developing AI business products. I think ‘develop’ is broad enough to include ‘train,’” Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy, tells Nieman Lab.

Meta has maintained that its new terms aren’t designed to scrape news content for free. In a statement to The Verge today, Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts reiterated that “content owners can use robots.txt to signal their preferences,” adding that the update “is not about scraping news sites, and these updates don’t give us new rights that supersede those preferences.”

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