{"id":935517,"date":"2026-10-16T19:08:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-16T19:08:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/935517\/"},"modified":"2026-10-16T19:08:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-16T19:08:09","slug":"meta-may-use-sweeping-new-commercial-tos-to-avoid-millions-in-ai-licensing-fees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/935517\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta may use sweeping new commercial TOS to avoid millions in AI licensing fees"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Kicking in on October 30, the TOS update won\u2019t allow businesses to opt out, instead suggesting that businesses stop using Meta services if they won\u2019t agree to let Meta bots freely crawl their linked content.<\/p>\n<p>As Nieman Lab <a href=\"https:\/\/www.niemanlab.org\/2026\/10\/metas-new-commercial-terms-will-allow-the-scraping-of-news-sites-legal-experts-say\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">reported<\/a> 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 <a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/tech-policy\/2024\/02\/why-the-new-york-times-might-win-its-copyright-lawsuit-against-openai\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">news organizations are fighting a battle with OpenAI<\/a> over whether such training without licensing is fair use, and Meta\u2019s terms seemingly risk granting it sweeping permissions, no matter which way the court leans.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhile journalism isn\u2019t the only industry that will be affected by this update, virtually every news organization has at least one Meta business account, including Nieman Lab,\u201d the lab said.<\/p>\n<p>Specifically, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/legal\/commercial_terms_preview\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">updated terms<\/a> say:<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019 use of Meta Company Products and services, and to periodically pull updates from such 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, the Meta Company Products, services, and features provided under these Commercial Terms and any other applicable supplemental terms.<\/p>\n<p>Notably, there is no mention of AI, but it\u2019s inferred from a single use of the word \u201ctrain\u201d and references to automated scraping and crawling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Legal experts are sounding alarms that Meta will soon update its commercial terms to require business accounts to&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":935518,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":["post-935517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=935517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935517\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/935518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=935517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=935517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=935517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}