Meta could use sweeping new commercial terms of service to avoid millions in AI licensing fees

Legal experts are sounding the alarm: Meta will soon update its terms of business to require business accounts to allow Meta to train AI on the content of their linked websites, not just their social media posts.

As of October 30, the TOS update will not allow businesses to opt out, instead suggesting businesses stop using Meta services if they do not agree to let Meta bots freely crawl their linked content.

As Nieman Lab reported Thursday, this will affect all business accounts, but is particularly shocking for news publishers who could potentially charge Meta millions in licensing fees to permanently access their articles for AI training. Currently, news organizations are fighting with OpenAI over whether such unlicensed training constitutes fair use, and Meta’s terms apparently risk granting it broad permissions regardless of which way the court decides.

“While journalism is not the only industry that will be affected by this update, virtually every news organization has at least one Meta business account, including Nieman Lab,” the lab said.

Specifically, the updated terms state:

You authorize us (or any entity acting on our behalf) to use automated software (such as web scrapers, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents) and to create test credentials to access, index, cache, crawl, collect, scrape, or crawl domains, web pages, or URLs (and any content available through them) that are associated with your products or services, or that are made available through your or users’ use of the products and services from Meta Company, and to periodically pull updates from these domains, web pages or URLs. Meta may use any content on such domains, web pages or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train and maintain the integrity of Meta’s products, services and functionality provided under these Terms of Business and any other applicable Additional Terms.

Notably, there is no mention of AI, but this is inferred from a single use of the word “train” and references to automated scraping and mining.