Image: sippakorn yamkasikorn @sippakorn via Unsplash
Who will blink first?
The world’s largest social media company, Meta, is gearing up for another battle that could end up in the courts over its newest attempt to pillage the intellectual property of journalists and writers and use it to develop products that will compete for readers and advertisers.
Meta’s latest assault on the financial viability of a free press is to grant itself sweeping powers to bulk scrape news sites for content to train its AI models. The move follows recent admissions by Microsoft and OpenAI that the predatory practice of using news content without permission to train large language models to generate summaries could constitute the “largest theft of labour in human history” and posed an existential threat to news publishing.
The first returning shots were fired by Nieman Lab when it reported last week that an update to Meta’s terms and conditions for commercial clients would allow it to use web scrapers to collect data from websites that were “associated with” business accounts on its platforms. That covers any content creator using Meta’s business suite to manage a bouquet of social media channels, which includes pretty much every major news outlet in the world as well as many non-profits, Blueprint included.
Nieman Lab asked some legal beagles to take a closer look at the new T&Cs, which take effect on 30 October, with no option to opt out. Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy, described it as “a remarkable provision to bury in [the] terms of service, given that this would give Meta access to material that would likely cost many millions of dollars in a licensing market”. He cautioned publishers to “assume that it would be enforceable”.
After the Nieman Lab story broke, Meta made some small concessions by removing the word “train” from its list of self-arrogated scraping privileges, and limited those to “advertising and business products”. The company claimed there’d been something of a misunderstanding, pointing out that all content owners – news media included – “still have the ability to disable the crawler via robots.txt flags”.
The legal experts aren’t convinced. They point out Meta still has the right to scrape entire sites, and while robots.txt indicate website preferences, compliance is entirely voluntary and not legally enforceable.
Various publishing bodies have voiced their concerns and vowed to fight the move. The European Publishers Council says it will petition the European Commission and EU regulatory authorities to ensure that publishers “retain the right to decide whether, how and on what terms their journalism is used by AI companies”.
“This is not consent freely given,” executive director Angela Mills Wade said. “It is an attempt to leverage platform dependency to extract valuable intellectual property without negotiation or remuneration.”
The UK publishing and journalism trade journal, Press Gazette, has launched the “Stop Google and Facebook destroying journalism” campaign. It quoted Theo Bamber, CEO of the News Media Association (UK), describing the move as a “shameless landgrab attempt” and “the worst kind of arrogant tech platform bullying”, urging ministers and regulators to stop Meta from “setting this dreadful precedent”.
Movement for an Open Web, a UK non-profit that campaigns for free access to the internet without proprietary tech restrictions, called on news publishers to delete all Meta corporate and business accounts by 30 October, and has filed complaints with the European Commission’s Directorate General for Competition and the UK Competition and Markets Authority.
Nieman Lab subsequently reported that on Thursday the largest media trade association in the US published an open letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, demanding that his company withdraw the terms before they take effect, and hold talks with publishers before making any further changes to Meta user terms. “News publishers will be forced into providing their valuable journalism to support the development of products that may be used to compete with them for readers and advertisers, under duress and without compensation,” wrote Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of News/Media Alliance. “Together, these harms threaten the financial viability of the free press.”
Coffey requested a response from Zuckerberg by Monday, or face possible legal action. “In the event Meta adopts these revised terms over our members’ express objections, our members do not consent to them and reserve all of their legal rights,” she said.
Her letter followed several others to the competition authorities in Europe, arguing that Meta’s terms violate the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, which is aimed at curbing the monopoly power of big tech companies.
Whether this firestorm of opposition will persuade Meta to back down, or if it chooses to treat the regulatory fines and legal challenges sure to follow merely as the cost of doing business, remains to be seen.
