Meta drops AI training wording; lawyers say scrape rights remain
Original title: Meta’s AI could still scrape news sites, legal experts say
Revised business terms still let Meta use site content to develop products, which lawyers say can include training.
Meta removed language from business-account terms that said it could train products on content from associated websites after publisher backlash. Lawyers told Nieman Lab the remaining right to use scraped content to develop any business product is broad enough to cover AI training and does not stop site-wide scraping. The terms take effect October 30. Meta says the update is not about scraping news and that robots.txt preferences still apply.
Unconfirmed: Whether the revised terms legally permit AI training is disputed between Meta and the lawyers quoted.
- Original terms said Meta may use any content to develop, research, and train products.
- Cornell’s James Grimmelmann says associated-site language still allows whole-site scraping.
- Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts says robots.txt signals still govern crawler preferences.
- Experts previously warned the terms could be argued to override blocking instructions.
- Vendors
- Meta
- Organizations
- Nieman Lab
From the original article
2 min read at theverge.com
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.
By Emma Roth · theverge.com
A short excerpt; the article and its images belong to the publisher. Summary, key facts and assessment above are AI-written from the article and can be wrong.