Meta AI news scraping remains an open question after the company changed its business terms, and legal experts say the revised wording may still let it copy content from news sites to train its AI. Meta says it is not scraping news content for free. The new terms are due to take effect on October 30.
What the business terms said
As first drafted, Meta's new terms for business accounts seemed to give the company permission to train its AI on news sites. The terms said Meta "may use any content" from websites linked to a business account to "develop, research" and "train" its products. Legal experts warned at the time that this could let Meta argue its commercial terms override blocking instructions such as robots.txt, a plain text file that tells automated crawlers which parts of a website they may visit.
After strong criticism from the publishing industry, Meta removed the language that said it would train its products on scraped content. The revised text still refers to using that content to develop products, and that wording is where much of the debate now sits.
Why legal experts remain unconvinced
James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, said the revision "does nothing to restrict" the phrase "associated with your products or services", which he argued could let Meta scrape entire sites. His concern is that the phrase ties the permission to websites connected to a business's offerings, so the revision leaves Meta AI news scraping open in his reading.
Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy, made a similar point. He said the word "develop" could be read broadly enough to include "train", and that "business product" is not a clearly defined term. He added that Meta is presumably developing AI business products, which keeps the question live for publishers.
Meta's position and what comes next
Meta has said its new terms are not designed to scrape news content for free. In a statement, spokesperson Daniel Roberts said content owners can use robots.txt to signal their preferences. He added that the update "is not about scraping news sites" and does not give Meta new rights that supersede those preferences.
Meta and the experts read the same clauses differently, and it is not yet clear how the terms will be applied once they take effect. For now, the practical question for publishers is whether robots.txt signals will be respected in the way Meta has described.
Aasan alfaaz mein
Meta ne apne business terms mein woh lafz hata diye hain jin se lagta tha ke woh news sites ka content AI training ke liye le sakta hai. Qanooni mahireen kehte hain ke tabdeeli kaafi nahi, kyunke "develop" aur "associated with your products" jaise alfaaz ab bhi scraping ka raasta khol sakte hain. Meta ka kehna hai ke ye update news sites ko scrape karne ke liye nahi hai, aur website owners robots.txt ke zariye apni marzi bata sakte hain. Ye terms 30 October se lagu honge, is liye news publishers aur content banane walon ko is par nazar rakhni chahiye.
