Meta has amended the business terms for corporate accounts to remove phrases that clearly indicated the possibility of using content from news websites to train its artificial intelligence models. However, legal experts believe these changes are not enough to dispel existing concerns regarding intellectual property rights and data collection.
Background of Terms Amendment and Legal Loopholes
The new business account terms, scheduled to take effect on October 30, granted Meta the right to use any content from websites linked to a business account for the development, research, and training of the company's products. Legal experts previously noted that this wording could give the company a pretext to bypass traditional blocking instructions such as the robots.txt file used by websites to guide search engines and crawling tools.
Following a wave of widespread anger and broad objections from the publishing and journalism sectors, Meta deleted the explicit training phrase, but the new amendments did not definitively close the door on those practices, according to specialists.
What Changes Practically?
Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy, explained that the revised version of the terms still allows Meta to use the gathered content to develop any "commercial product." Given that the phrase commercial product is not a precisely defined term, and Meta is likely to develop business products relying on artificial intelligence, the term "development" remains broad enough to implicitly include the "training" process.
For his part, James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital information law at Cornell Law School, pointed out that the amended terms do not restrict clauses related to linking content with products and services, which may allow the company to continue gathering entire website data.
Meta's Position
In contrast, Meta asserted that its new terms were not designed to collect news content for free. Company spokesperson Daniel Roberts explained that content owners can still use robots.txt files to express their preferences, emphasizing that the update does not target news websites nor grant the company new rights that bypass those preferences.