Meta’s revised business terms may still enable the company to justify training its AI models on scraped content from news sites.
Although Meta removed specific language regarding training, legal experts argue the changes are insufficient to alleviate concerns. James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, explains to Nieman Lab that the terms still permit Meta to scrape entire sites by allowing the use of content "associated with your products or services."
Originally, the updated terms, set to take effect October 30th, allowed Meta to use content from business accounts to "develop, research," and "train" its products. This initially raised fears that Meta could override standard blocking instructions, such as the robots.txt file that dictates crawler access.
Following significant backlash from the publishing industry, Meta eliminated the word "train" but retained language permitting the use of scraped content to develop "business products." Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy, points out to Nieman Lab that "business product" is an undefined term, and "develop" is broad enough to encompass "training" AI.
Meta maintains that the updates were not intended to scrape news content. In a statement to The Verge, spokesperson Daniel Roberts reiterated that content owners can utilize robots.txt to signal preferences and that the changes do not grant new rights to supersede these preferences.
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