Meta may use sweeping new commercial TOS to avoid millions in AI licensing fees

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Legal experts are sounding alarms that Meta will soon update its commercial terms to require business accounts to allow Meta to train AI on their linked website content, not just their social media posts. Kicking in on October 30, the TOS update won’t allow businesses to opt out, instead suggesting that businesses stop using Meta services if they won’t agree to let Meta bots freely crawl their linked content.

法律专家们发出警告称，Meta 即将更新其商业条款，要求企业账户允许 Meta 利用其关联网站的内容（而不仅仅是社交媒体帖子）来训练人工智能。此次服务条款更新将于 10 月 30 日生效，且不允许企业选择退出；Meta 反而建议，如果企业不同意让其机器人自由抓取关联内容，则应停止使用 Meta 的服务。

As Nieman Lab reported Thursday, this will affect all business accounts but is particularly shocking for news publishers who could perhaps charge Meta millions in licensing fees to continually access their articles for AI training. Currently news organizations are fighting a battle with OpenAI over whether such training without licensing is fair use, and Meta’s terms seemingly risk granting it sweeping permissions, no matter which way the court leans.

正如尼曼实验室（Nieman Lab）周四报道的那样，此举将影响所有企业账户，但对新闻出版商而言尤为令人震惊，因为他们本可以就 Meta 为 AI 训练持续访问其文章的行为收取数百万美元的许可费。目前，新闻机构正就未经许可的此类训练是否属于“合理使用”与 OpenAI 进行抗争，而 Meta 的条款似乎有可能赋予其广泛的权限，无论法院最终倾向于哪一方。

“While journalism isn’t the only industry that will be affected by this update, virtually every news organization has at least one Meta business account, including Nieman Lab,” the lab said. Specifically, the updated terms say: 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 users’ use of Meta Company Products and services, and to periodically pull updates from such domains, web pages, or URLs.

该实验室表示：“虽然新闻业并非唯一受此更新影响的行业，但几乎每家新闻机构都至少拥有一个 Meta 企业账户，包括尼曼实验室在内。”具体而言，更新后的条款规定：您授权我们（或任何代表我们的实体）使用自动化软件（如网页抓取工具、机器人、爬虫和用户代理）并创建测试凭据，以访问、索引、缓存、分析、收集、检索或抓取与您的产品或服务相关联，或通过您或用户对 Meta 公司产品和服务的使用而提供的域名、网页或 URL（以及其中可用的任何内容），并定期从这些域名、网页或 URL 中提取更新。

Meta may use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of, the Meta Company Products, services, and features provided under these Commercial Terms and any other applicable supplemental terms. Notably, there is no mention of AI, but it’s inferred from a single use of the word “train” and references to automated scraping and crawling.

Meta 可以使用来自这些域名、网页或 URL 的任何内容，以提供、开发、改进、研究、训练并维护根据这些商业条款及任何其他适用补充条款所提供的 Meta 公司产品、服务和功能的完整性。值得注意的是，条款中并未提及“人工智能”，但从文中唯一一次出现的“训练”一词以及对自动化抓取和爬取的引用中可以推断出这一点。

Meta’s spokesperson told Nieman Lab that Meta has no plans to use the terms as a legal basis to ignore robots.txt instructions that block scraping on news sites. The company still allows news organizations to opt out of scraping and provides instructions on how to block crawling. A spokesperson told Ars that “there is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false.”

Meta 的发言人告诉尼曼实验室，Meta 并不打算将这些条款作为法律依据来无视新闻网站上阻止抓取的 robots.txt 指令。该公司仍然允许新闻机构选择退出抓取，并提供了如何阻止爬取的说明。一位发言人告诉 Ars：“Meta 使用网络爬虫的方式没有任何改变；任何相反的说法都是错误的。”

However, should courts affirm that AI training on non-news articles is fair use, news organizations question if Meta’s stance might change, and the terms could be used to freely grab access to content by legally overriding robots.txt instructions. Three legal experts told Nieman Lab that it’s not clear if a court would enforce the terms, but they could be “used to argue that Meta can scrape content from news sites and use that content to train the company’s AI products.”

然而，如果法院认定对非新闻文章进行 AI 训练属于“合理使用”，新闻机构质疑 Meta 的立场是否会发生改变，以及这些条款是否会被用来通过法律手段凌驾于 robots.txt 指令之上，从而自由获取内容。三位法律专家告诉尼曼实验室，目前尚不清楚法院是否会执行这些条款，但它们可能“被用来辩称 Meta 可以抓取新闻网站的内容，并利用这些内容来训练该公司的 AI 产品”。

Particularly concerning, James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, told Nieman Lab that Meta could “train AI on any content from their sites” and possibly “deploy some of that content, even in competition with the publishers themselves” on Meta platforms. Additionally, Meta just began charging users to post links on its platforms, Nieman Lab noted. So, the terms seem to give Meta a path to first charge publishers for sharing links, then use that cash-for-links program to seize permission to scrape those links to train AI.

康奈尔法学院数字与信息法教授詹姆斯·格里梅尔曼（James Grimmelmann）向尼曼实验室指出，特别令人担忧的是，Meta 可能“利用其网站上的任何内容来训练 AI”，并可能“在 Meta 平台上部署其中部分内容，甚至与出版商自身形成竞争”。此外，尼曼实验室指出，Meta 刚刚开始对其平台上的链接发布收费。因此，这些条款似乎为 Meta 提供了一条路径：先向出版商收取链接分享费用，然后利用这一“付费链接”计划获取抓取这些链接以训练 AI 的权限。

Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy, told Nieman Lab that “this is 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.” What actually changed with TOS update? Meta announced the update in a blog, where the company claimed it was simply “streamlining” its commercial terms.

Loevy & Loevy 律师事务所的媒体与知识产权律师马特·托皮克（Matt Topic）告诉尼曼实验室：“考虑到这会让 Meta 获得在许可市场上可能价值数百万美元的材料，将这一条款埋在服务条款中是非常惊人的。”服务条款更新到底改变了什么？Meta 在一篇博客中宣布了此次更新，声称这只是在“精简”其商业条款。

In a statement to Nieman Lab, a spokesperson said that “language around crawling was previously scattered across different terms of use, including terms about using generative AI in ads, and this update consolidates them in one place.” “Content owners can still manage how their content is accessed by using robots.txt,” the spokesperson said. However, Ars compared the current terms to updates, and what Meta calls “streamlining” seems to ignore that the new terms use fresh language and grant broader provisions.

在一份给尼曼实验室的声明中，发言人表示：“关于爬取的措辞此前分散在不同的使用条款中，包括关于在广告中使用生成式 AI 的条款，此次更新将它们整合在了一处。”发言人称：“内容所有者仍然可以通过使用 robots.txt 来管理其内容的访问方式。”然而，Ars 对比了当前条款与更新后的条款，发现 Meta 所称的“精简”似乎忽略了新条款使用了全新的措辞并授予了更广泛的权限。

In Meta’s current commercial terms, there are no mentions of “test credentials” that, experts warned Nieman Lab, could allow Meta to bypass paywalls and automate scraping. “Test credentials” also are not mentioned in Meta’s Product Catalog Terms or Ad Creative Generative AI Terms, which are the other policies that are being combined with the commercial terms.

在 Meta 此前的商业条款中，并未提及“测试凭据”。专家警告尼曼实验室，这些凭据可能允许 Meta 绕过付费墙并实现自动化抓取。“测试凭据”也没有在 Meta 的产品目录条款或广告创意生成式 AI 条款中提及，而这些正是此次与商业条款合并的其他政策。

For news groups parsing policies Meta discussed in its blog, this seemed like fresh language that Meta only introduced this month in Self-Service Ads Terms. Asked to clarify if “test credentials” were referred to in any prior policies, a Meta spokesperson pointed Ars to this Seller Agreement, which is not mentioned in Meta’s blog announcing the commercial terms update.

对于那些分析 Meta 博客中所述政策的新闻团体来说，这似乎是 Meta 本月才在“自助广告条款”中引入的全新措辞。当被问及是否在任何先前的政策中提到过“测试凭据”时，Meta 发言人向 Ars 指向了一份《卖家协议》，而该协议并未在 Meta 宣布商业条款更新的博客中提及。

That policy requires sellers who use Meta’s e-commerce products to allow Meta to “use automated software and create test credentials to retrieve information from domains, webpages or other URLs you provide,” so that Meta can optimize their listings and content. Just as the seller agreement limits permissions to a specific purpose, the self-service ad terms are limited to users who want to grant Meta permission to scrape their content in order to generate ads. In both cases, a policy of requiring “test credentials” to bypass paywalls perhaps seems less egregious when it’s tailored to a niche business purpose.

该政策要求使用 Meta 电子商务产品的卖家允许 Meta“使用自动化软件并创建测试凭据，以从您提供的域名、网页或其他 URL 中检索信息”，以便 Meta 优化其列表和内容。正如卖家协议将权限限制在特定目的上一样，自助广告条款也仅限于那些希望授予 Meta 抓取其内容以生成广告权限的用户。在这两种情况下，当“测试凭据”政策被限定在特定的商业目的时，其绕过付费墙的行为似乎显得不那么令人反感。