Meta, the parent company of Facebook, recently changed its terms of service for business accounts, granting itself sweeping new authority to scrape business users’ websites for content to power its artificial intelligence products without a contract or compensation.
Legal and media experts say these revisions may affect news companies, film studios and recording artists, among many others.
“The text is so far reaching that any business with intellectual property online and a Meta business account could have their copyrighted material taken from them,” Danielle Coffey, President and CEO of the News/Media Alliance, said in a statement.
“We should be asking: If Taylor Swift has a Meta business account, does that mean that Meta will have access to scrape copyrighted media hosted on her website?”
The change, which is set to take effect on Oct. 30, affects any and all entities with free business accounts – which are encouraged by Meta for “businesses, brands, and celebrities.” Such accounts are in common use across many industries, including the media.
The new terms of use unilaterally grant Meta the authority to “use automated software” to grab “any content” in order to “develop” its own offerings, including artificial intelligence.
For example, if a newspaper posts a link to one of its own stories on its own Facebook page, Meta now claims it can automatically retrieve anything else on that publication’s web site and use it to “develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity” of a slew of its products and services.
If businesses don’t like the new terms, Meta tells companies to cease using its services. That ultimatum has not sat well with some observers.
“I think (publishers) absolutely should be concerned,” Matthew Sag, a law professor at Emory University, told Bay Area News Group. “Meta is the 800-pound gorilla and even big publishers are dramatically affected by what Meta chooses to do.”
Meta has downplayed what might otherwise have been an arcane change to its contractual language, and has told journalists that this is a “consolidation” of other revisions across its terms of service.
The update might have gone unnoticed if it hadn’t been flagged earlier this month by a Bay Area steampunk enthusiast, Stephen Beale, who then tipped off Nieman Lab, a widely-read journalism industry publication.
Meta’s move comes at a time when the media industry as a whole is largely wary of Big Tech and AI companies that are allegedly stealing or misusing their original content as a way to improve AI models.
Some publishers have already signed content licensing deals, which would allow tech firms to re-use or re-purpose journalistic content, in exchange for millions of dollars in annual fees. Just this week, CNN and Axios signed such a deal with Google.
But, numerous publishers, including MediaNews Group, the parent company of this news organization, are in active litigation against some of these companies.
Steven Lieberman, an attorney who represents The Mercury News and seven other MediaNews Group publications in one of those ongoing cases involving related claims against Microsoft and OpenAI, said Meta’s sudden change to its own terms of service was sneaky.
“I would say it’s an overreaching and frankly slimy attempt by Meta to either trick people or coerce them into the use of their content for free,” he told Bay Area News Group. “What Meta is doing is shady, it’s inappropriate, and it’s dishonest.”
Similarly, Matt Topic, a Chicago-based media lawyer, told Bay Area News Group that he likened Meta’s recent moves to a “land grab.”
“Everyone should be worried about AI companies, including Meta, taking a ton of news content and using it to create products that are harming the news business and threatening to decimate the news business,” he said.
Meta, which declined to respond to Bay Area News Group’s specific questions, said in an unsigned corporate statement sent by Daniel Roberts, a company spokesperson, that the terms of service changes are meant to streamline related contractual changes.
“There is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false,” the company said. “We’re simply consolidating our commercial and self-serve ad terms to make it easier for businesses to understand our advertising rules.”
Meta says publishers can still control how automated systems generally interact with their content by updating a digital “web crawler” known as robots.txt, which most websites commonly have. That file lists voluntary instructions to automated processes and dictates what they are allowed to do.
In a message posted on social media on Friday morning, Andy Stone, the company’s vice president of communications, said there was “no change” to how the company was using web crawlers.
“This update is designed to make sure we’re able to pull accurate information about products for sale on third-party websites when making on-platform ad and content recommendations, not about scraping news sites,” he wrote.
That explanation isn’t enough for Eric Goldman, a tech law professor at Santa Clara University, who told Bay Area News Group that Meta’s new language is “extremely broad.”
He said if the company wasn’t actually being as aggressive as many people believe, the company could have made its new terms much clearer.
“Meta could have written its contract language (in a different way), it could have said to tell us to not scrape or train via robots.txt — since they didn’t appear to do that, then there’s an interesting conflict,” Goldman said.
“If Meta is acting in bad faith they could try to weaponize that clause to steamroll over that robots.txt instruction.”