An upcoming update to Meta’s terms of service will allow Meta “or any entity acting on our behalf” to remove the websites of any company that uses a Meta service for commercial purposes. Meta already spiders the web on a titanic scale, so the expanded terms seem like a move to shore up the company’s legal foundation while betting its future on web browsing agents like its Muse AI agent. Broad terms could allow Meta to index commercial sites for Muse to browse or for its advertising business, or train Muse on how actual commercial operations are designed, while also allowing Meta to present Muse as an all-purpose commercial agent. According to Ars Technica, the move could allow Meta to dodge many millions of dollars in content licensing fees, while Nieman Lab reported that the new terms potentially block news organizations from accessing Meta audiences on platforms like Facebook with the contractual condition that they allow Meta to scrape their websites and use the content. The update launches on October 30 and covers any website “associated with” any of a commercial user’s products or services (another generalized claim). Meta defines business users as accounts that advertise, market, sell, or list products, develop applications, create or use product catalogs, manage a business page or group, or use any business product, such as Meta Business Suite, which allows businesses to manage all of their accounts from one console. One can imagine this would give Meta mining rights to an impressive swath of the open web. The new clause says: You authorize us (or any entity acting on our behalf) to use automated software (such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers and user agents) and create test credentials to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve or crawl the 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 your users’ use of Meta products and services Company, and periodically extract updates from said domains, web pages or URLs. Meta may use any content from such domains, web pages or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train and maintain the integrity of Meta Company’s products, services and features provided under these Terms of Business and any applicable supplemental terms. “This is a remarkable arrangement to bury in [the] terms of service, since this would give Meta access to material that would likely cost many millions of dollars in a licensing market,” Loevy & Loevy intellectual property and media attorney Matt Topic told Nieman Lab. “It’s unclear whether a court would enforce this, but publishers should assume it would be enforceable.” James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, told Nieman Lab that the update “clearly represents permission for Meta to train AI on any content on their sites and possibly deploy some of that content, even in competition with the publishers themselves.” The broader interpretation, he said, would allow Meta to systematically extract and archive news articles and offer them to users as content as the company desires. Grimmelmann also argued that the phrase “trial credentials” would allow Meta to register with sites to gain access to private content. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that this could extend to content behind paywalls. Meta also recently implemented Meta One, a paid subscription service that is actually more of a way for Meta to charge some Facebook and Instagram users money to avoid new external link limits. Nieman Lab argued: “Put another way, Meta has started charging users for posting links to the same content that will be allowed to crawl for free.” Meta has granted some publishers an exemption from the program, at least for now, Meta declined to answer Nieman Lab’s questions about Meta One or how to avoid paywalls. Meta’s said the “test credentials” language previously appeared in its Seller Agreement, but Ars noted that the policy appeared narrowly tailored to seller-provided URLs submitted specifically to optimize their listings. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone wrote on preferences.” It added that the update is to “make sure we can get accurate information about products for sale on third-party websites by making recommendations for content and ads on the platform, not news sites.” However, Search Engine Journal noted that Meta’s terms already allowed scraping of advertiser sites, including for training. It’s just the October update that “reaches businesses that don’t buy ads,” the site wrote. “Meta’s new terms of commercial use are outrageous and likely illegal,” it wrote in a News/Media Alliance President and CEO Danielle Coffey said: “When I talk to my students about how to modify. [terms of service agreements]”I say you have to give users a genuine option to opt out of the terms,” Santa Clara University School of Law associate dean of research and law professor Eric Goldman told The Register. “Otherwise it’s just Hobson’s choice or Morton’s fork.” Goldman added that there are questions about whether this extension of existing business relationships is enforceable, and while Meta may be acting in good faith, “Meta does not have any reserves of good faith among the community that it can draw on.” Giving Meta the benefit of the doubt is something he “simply can’t do anymore…” Goldman said.
