Legal experts say Meta's AI may still scrape news websites

Meta revised the business account terms that take effect on October 30, removing the statement that content from linked websites could be used to train its products, but legal experts believe this is still not enough to rule out the possibility of its AI scraping news websites. The change came after strong opposition from the publishing industry; the original terms stated that Meta could use any content from websites linked to a business account to develop, research and train its products, and experts at the time pointed out that this could be used to argue that the business terms take precedence over blocking instructions such as robots.txt. Cornell Law School professor James Grimmelmann said the retained wording about content related to products or services still allows Meta to scrape entire websites; lawyer Matt Topic believes the revised version still allows scraped content to be used to develop business products, and the word develop is broad enough to include training. Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts responded that content owners can express their preferences via robots.txt, and that this update does not concern scraping news websites and does not grant new rights that override these preferences.