HN

Comments (84)

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  amluto
  I don’t really understand the legal theory here. Party A (Meta) writes a contract with Party B (a business account holder) ostensibly granting A the right to scrape B’s website and a license to the content.But why is there any presumption that B owns the content or has any right to grant this license? It’s extremely common for a publisher to license content from a third party under terms that may not allow this sort of sublicencing. What happens if the publisher can’t grant this license?
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  Centigonal
  This is some next level legal judo. Say what you want about the metaverse or muse, but it's clear that Meta is still innovating when it comes to its Terms of Service.
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  nananana9
  Doesn't them requiring a license from partners to train on their content undermine the more general argument that they don't need a license from copyright owners to train on copyrighted content -- which I assume most big AI firms would love to make?IANAL, but this looks like Meta lawyers trying to shield themselves against partners' suing them, but enough cases like this could help set a precedent that -- yes, you do in fact need a license.
• bradley13
  IANAL and I know I'm a minority opinion, but: seems to me that scraping must be legal. If you put content online, it is readable by anyone (or anything) who cares to look. Don't want it read, put it behind a login or a paywall.
• sandeepkd
  I do not want to be cynical, yet my reading is that they are most likely doing it already. This is to provide a legal cover to it.
• phyzome
  "Will consent", that's some interesting phrasing in the current post title.
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  Terr_
  What happens when I put a Terms of Service on my website (esp. with a firm click-wrap) which says Meta agrees to not scrape my website--notwithstanding any prior agreement--and will owe me a billion dollars in damages if they do?
• zenincognito
  The most aggressive bot on our website right now is Meta Bot - here is an AI index - https://mojodojo.io/ai-crawler-index
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  thayne
  That's a bold move. I imagine a lot of businesses will leave Meta over this. And if their gamble pays off, and businesses can't afford not to advertise on Meta platforms, then there is probably a good antitrust case for them abusing their oligopoly power.
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  gumby
  I don’t use Facebook much but the last time I logged in I was surprised to discover that I am now a business and can’t change it back.
• bilekas
  So basically, thanks for building our business side of Facebook for all those years, we are changing the rules of the game now in so if you want to continue using our service, we get to use all of your website's data however we like in perpetuity.There isn't even a veil of "customer satisfaction is important" anymore.
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  olalonde
  In Meta's defense, I don't think you actually need a business' consent to scrape their website.
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  garbawarb
  I assume this is because of Muse? A lot of businesses block bots which stops Muse from being able to buy from those websites on a user's behalf. It seems like that'd be good for the businesses too.
• rochak
  Seems like Meta is using the new meta
• herbst
  Ok fine. So will it stop crawling my websites so extensively? I never had a business account
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  tedeh
  That's terror. Terror built into the system.
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  SomeHacker44
  I am not a lawyer, but I can't see how any court would enforce this unconscionable term in a clickwrap license.
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  sailfast
  This company is poison. You have built a few things people liked, bought some other things people really liked, and then used that good will to completely screw over the entire internet.I know why you haven’t quit yet, but you probably should right? You’ve got your vested shares and you’re comfortable. Why are you still doing this to us?
• ProofHouse
  "Consent." It's not consent.
• shevy-java
  Well - don't outsource your company to Suckerberg's evil empire.Oddly enough, many don't seem to want to have a company homepage, in particular smaller companies.
• VladVladikoff
  As a business owner who has meta accounts and even advertises on meta, I have long since blocked their crawler traffic. They try to hide their scraper traffic dishonestly behind user agents that purport to be Facebook users browsing the web via their Facebook browser, the thing is, I know it’s a lie because there is absolutely no reason for 1000s of Facebook users from Ireland to want to know anything about a small local business in Canada, that only services local clients within 50km radius due to the nature of the business. So I know it’s a lie, therefore was blocked. And guess what, fuck your terms of service the blocks are staying in place.
• SoftTalker
  When you let someone else host your content, you don't control your content.
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  tantalor
  That's bundling.
• christkv
  I fail to understand how is this different to a google web crawler in practice other than ignoring the robots.txt?
• bozhangquant
  Scraping is easy. The hard part is that the page can change after you scraped it, and there's no way to prove what it said before.
• ChrisArchitect
  Title is: Meta’s new commercial terms will allow the scraping of news sites, (legal) experts say
• g-b-r
  The test credentials thing, to bypass publisher paywalls with fake accounts, is pretty smart