In this case, Party B is sandwiched between Party A (scraper such as Meta) and Party C (the third-party content provider). The scraping agreement dictates A-B relationship and the licensing agreement dictates B-C relationship. Devil is in the fine print as far as what is allowed in both agreements.

Party B has already committed to uphold B-C. Entering A-B may put them at risk of violating that agreement by appearing to grant Party A rights that Party C never granted to anyone but Party B (and maybe even rights that Party B doesn't enjoy). Party B's options are don't consent to A-B (e.g., withdraw from Meta program), take down the Party C content (which would suck if they've already paid for it), or negotiate a carve-out with one or both of Parties A and C.

(IANAL)

I'd guess that Meta is going to scrap everything anyway, and this license addition is just something that they think may come in useful if there are future court cases. The details of who has permission to grant licenses won't matter until then.

Not a lawyer, but my understanding is that crawling is a gray area. By putting that into their terms of service that most of the planet is agreeing to, they protect themselves in the case someone complains.

Also, this is about crawling and has little to do with the license of the contents.

My guess is - legal or not, Facebook might’ve calculated the consequences (aka, fines) and decided it is worth the cost. Most publishers will not have the resources to fight them in court anyways

Isn’t the reasonable expectation that publishers don’t transfer rights they don’t own?

What happens if the publisher has a license granted by their tier1 but their tier1 can’t grant this license?

Not a lawyer, but what if someone did this:

- Find examples of content that will constitute infringement. Then send Meta legal a notice saying here are examples where the publisher does not own the content, and their scraping is not legal. Our current/future clients will be damaged by Meta's planned actions.

This might elevate it to willful infringement.

Given how most of SV seems to work, they will likely simply continue scraping the content regardless of license.

Is that different from them doing whatever with your data, without knowing if that's actually messages written by you, pictures of you alone taken by you etc?

“Hello, it’s me - the expensive lawyer”

> But why is there any presumption that B owns the content or has any right to grant this license?

Because they placed the content on a public website.

> What happens if the publisher can’t grant this license?

Then it's unlikely that the content is something they themselves have the rights to broadcast on their website.

In a just world, meta wouldn't exist like this. I fail to see any benefit in a company like this. I can't think of a single useful product or advancement they've made besides creating the page that makes grandma go insane and young people everywhere to hate themselves.

They're pointedly worse than most other social media. Even twitter doesn't really pretend they're anything but a place to say slurs now that "comedy is legal".

Meta feels so much more nefarious due to how 99% of their business is quiet deals with data brokers and ad buyers, and they just smile and nod as if they make anything positive at all. It feels like a company that makes most of it's money selling heroin, but they have a cute storefront so they get a pass.

This is some next-level newspeak euphemism. I foresee a stellar career in PR or the ministry of propaganda.

the scariest engineers are financial and legal engineers

If you don't have a license to download the material, aren't you doing piracy?

If the licenses say that download is only permitted if you agree not to train on it or similar, then if you have downloaded it, you have agreed to the license, have you not?

Not really. Consent has always been required. If a web server happily serves you up news content then you've been given clear consent to use it. Yes means yes. However, a site reserves the right to say no to whomever it pleases. News sites especially often don't happily serve up their content. Often you need to pay for access, for example. Hacking into their systems to retrieve content that wasn't normally happily given to you is clearly against the law. These terms gives Meta access to all content that is accessible to Meta users, seeing publishers agree to not say no to Meta.

TOS has nothing to do with copyright. A TOS can prevent scraping, training, or any other activity that is not covered by copyright. Public web scraping is subject only to copyright because no TOS has been agreed to, but what Meta is doing here applies to scraping things that are not available on the public web.

You should do it, so we find out.

(But my guess is that such Terms of Services are not considered accepted only by visiting or crawling the website. There probably need to be at least a clock through performed by an human)

Facebook is a zillion dollar company, so they get to decide what will happen.

They’ll say their TOS is the prior agreement. It’s genius.

Will you enforce it?

If Meta clicks on the checkbox and agrees to the TOS then it is binding on them just like any other contract. If they don't, then it isn't.

There have been many many reasons for businesses to leave Meta over the past decade, and almost none of them have

Doubt it. Most are already being scraped by meta and do nothing about it because they lack the technical competency to even notice it.

Why? Let's say I am a restaurant. How is Meta's activity here damaging to my business?

Is this what Americans mean by corporate personhood?

No, but you do in order to rebroadcast some content they created themselves. If they obtain this consent from a business, then that business cannot find some piece of their copyrighted stuff in Meta's AI output and launch a copyright complaint.

You don't need their consent, but they don't suffer if they block you. Now Meta is saying they would be breaking their TOS.

Do business accounts on FB provide user activity data, such as checkout completion, user acquisition funnels, or other useful labeling of web behavior?

Because the scrapes become more interesting once combined with such information.

No but they’re covering themselves as they’re also making fake accounts to bypass login walls. Probably to avoid a similar nitter issue.

This makes the most sense. Meta can guarantee at least that cohort of sites will permit their agents to operate, and all they needed to do was publish a tos update. Some Meta PM is smiling today, in between bites of infant flesh.

iirc when I was dealing with reviewing traffic and AI scraping bots recently, I noticed something about Meta's: When a user links to a page, the bots that grab oembed data to generate the link preview are using the same User Agent string as the Meta AI crawlers that scrape content.

For context, oembed data about your page could be seen as information you're basically happy to share, so other sites can create things like previews.

That's not necessary, there are other companies that just use different UA strings for the different tasks. They appear to deliberately make it so that if you have nothing to do with Meta and block their content scrapers, you also break basic functionality for people who happen to share a link to your site in their products.

And Canada since they're still blocking Canadian news content?

Doubt they'll go over well in Australia as well, given the media bargaining code.

This is not a healthy way to think. Meta strong-arming news websites is not the beginning of the end. Get off the internet and try to enjoy your life.

I really hoped Deus Ex would become less relevant to real-world problems as the years went on, but here we are...

> "[T]hey'll give people some freedom, but essentially it will be 20th-century capitalism: a corporate elite protected by laws and tax-codes."

One could argue that if you hate these megacorps then the best thing you can do (as an engineer)is to work for them and purposefully be a monkey wrench in the cogs. Be competent enough to not get fired, maximize the company resources you take up while minimizing your output. Delay delay delay and if you're really good at it, never deliver. Take as much of their time and money as possible and give as little back. Thats basically what they're doing to the rest of us. And when its gets too evil you can always leave. In the meantime you are taking up headcount that could have actually advanced their goals further, faster, evil-er.

or ... just check the user-agent and serve a different page accordingly.

So did Canada, and succeeded but were exiled from Facebook.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/online-news-act-meta-facebo...

I have never, I hope I'm not living under a rock, heard this from Google. Not with Gemini and not in the pre-LLM days where they were indexing the web

Facebook is run by a criminal known for such lovely things as 'if you need info on anyone at Harvard just ask, they 'trust me', dumb fucks', 'I'm going to fuck them [Winklevoss twins] probably in the ear' 'you can be unethical and legal and that's how I live my life haha' and that's just at Harvard never mind all the other things he's done since

I agree there are anti-trust/monopoly issues here, but I'm not sure if if that's the right term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_(antitrust_law)

It's really a miracle that any judicial system considers "clicking accept without reading" to be a valid form of binding contract in the first place.

This is an agreement between two businesses, not a clickwrap license being forced upon consumers. Businesses have plenty of alternatives to Meta; they can just close their accounts if they don't like the terms.

Is it illegal to scrape websites? Idk, feels like consenting to being filmed in public, it's already legal.

Go ahead. Download all the assets form https://www.disney.com and make your own. And their lawyers will explain clearly why are you wrong.

You're certainly right that you're not a lawyer, and have a minority opinion.