Meta may use sweeping new commercial TOS to avoid millions in AI licensing fees
Summary
Meta will update its commercial terms starting October 30 to require business accounts to let Meta automatically collect and use content from their linked websites for AI training. This change means businesses cannot opt out and may affect news publishers who could lose licensing fee claims for their articles.Key Facts
- Meta’s new terms let it use automated tools like bots to collect content from websites linked to business accounts.
- The content collected can be used to improve and train Meta’s AI and other services.
- Businesses must agree to these terms or stop using Meta’s services; there is no opt-out option.
- News organizations are concerned because they could lose millions in fees from AI companies using their articles without paying.
- Meta says it will respect blocking files (robots.txt) that tell crawlers not to access a site, but it is unclear if this will hold legally.
- Legal experts say Meta might gain broad rights to scrape content for AI, which could affect publishers’ control over their material.
- Meta has also started charging users for posting links, possibly tying these fees to the new content scraping rules.
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