Meta plans to amend its Terms of Service, potentially securing far-reaching rights to use journalistic content. This raises the question for media companies as to whether their content may be automatically collected and used for AI applications in the future even without separate consent.
Prof. Dr. Matthias C. Kettemann explains in his statement for the Science Media Center which copyright and regulatory issues the planned changes raise. He points out that the systematic collection and analysis of journalistic content is subject to copyright restrictions and that broad usage rights cannot simply be granted through amended terms of service. He also sees a risk that Meta will use its dominant market position to impose unreasonable terms on media companies.
From the Statement
“Linking to articles and displaying a short link preview are not problematic. Systematic crawling, storing, and analyzing entire publisher offerings, on the other hand, constitutes reproduction under copyright law, for which Meta needs a license or a statutory exception. The text and data mining exception (TDM exception, Section 44b of the German Copyright Act [UrhG], Article 4 of the DSM Directive) does not apply if publishers have declared a machine-readable restriction on use—and many have done so.”
“Anyone who makes accessing Facebook and Instagram contingent on companies transferring extensive usage rights to their entire web content for free is demanding disproportionate consideration for the platform’s service. According to the amended Terms of Service, simply sharing a link is sufficient, even for users not affiliated with a publisher or newspaper. This is a classic case of tying and exploitation.”
The full statement by Matthias C. Kettemann can be found in German on the Science Media Center website.