That's the (evil) genius in Meta's terms: they get the right to scrap out of thin air, and the only party liable to the scraping is B.

I am not an expert in licensing legalese, but that strikes me as awfully wrong. If I am e.g. a musician and I license my work to be used by B for specific purposes and B unilaterally signs an agreement with A that gives them rights to my stuff, the question is gonna be what MY licensing terms allow. They have an agreement with me. Whether they enter other agreements is their decision to make, but they still have to fulfill my terms.

Sure, they should not sign things that put them into the spot of having to break my licensing agreement with me, but the fact that these kind of legal stretches are even seen as valid in the US reassures me in my stance to avoid business relations with the US. I prefer countries with a legal system that can't easily be bent out of shape using money.

If they really want to be spiteful they can rewrite all the news articles they post to Meta using Muse. Then we can finally see if the theories of statistical model collapse hold up at the trillion param level model scale.

Yes that makes senses. It's a hedge.

Meta's past behaviour has been to ignore illegality in business, with the hope that they can either win in court or stave off legal action altogether.

That's how they acted with the books they pirated to train models and when they targeted children with gambling products to increase revenue.

They love a legal grey area. It's not what's moral it's what you can get away with.

Not a lawyer, but my understanding is that if a Big Tech company doesn't explicitly rule out using your data, they're using your data. And if they rule it out explicitly, they will eventually still use your data.

Big Tech will tell you that you care too much.

Most publishers have resources - it is millions, but it looks like a cut an dried case that they are highly likely to win. A 2 $million investment that results in $10 million dollar is a good investment. The numbers seem reasonable, though of course publishers need to consider their real situation.

Just register the copyright on things that you expect Meta to use. Registering a copyright is cheap and gives you the right to sue for triple damages for any infringement after the copyright is registered. You must have a registered copyright to sue, if you register the copyright after the infringement you can only sue for actual damages.

Consult a real lawyer if this matters to you. The above is my understanding of the law, but I'm not a lawyer and different countries have slightly different laws.

When pubs & cafés play music here in the UK they pay royalty fees to PRS for Music.

If I record the songs playing & they sell bootleg CDs, I don't have a defence of "but it was played in public, so all copyright was waived". That's not how copyright works.

Dead wrong on both points. Having a license to publish something on a website does not mean that the publisher has the right to grant sublicenses or transfer the license to someone else. For example, stock image licenses are normally non-sublicensable and non-transferable.

> Because they placed the content on a public website.

I don't think this is a very good argument. For instance, if I have a company, called 'tickle-cats', I may expect regular customers to go and tickle a cat for, say, 1 cent, as cost. So I would expect regular people to visit my homepage.

I may not necessarily expect or want to have bots, scrapers and what not, per se. I may have this by extension - possibly, e. g. to rank a website more highly. But bots and so forth are not my real target audience to begin with (and some are just malicious, trying to disrupt the business); some company owners may want to not have to do anything with them (bots, crawlers etc...). That's just one example of many more; I don't think the distinction "public versus private" is the only one that can be applied here.