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.

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impossiblefork a day ago | parent | next [-]

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?

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Ajedi32 a day ago | parent | next [-]

I don't think it works like that. I can't just write "By reading this comment, you have agreed to pay me $100." and expect that to be legally enforceable unless you explicitly agreed to a contract to that effect in advance before reading the comment.

I could write "If you don't agree to pay me $100, I reserve the right to block your future access to my comments." (Which is what a ToS is.) But that's not a license agreement.

	▲	impossiblefork 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, but you can have one page where people agree to a certain license and if they agree are allowed to download another document. TOS agreements often have terms concerning things like in which venues disputes about them are to be handled etc., and often have penalties other than the service simply being ended, and if those are valid, then this kind of thing is too.

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SAI_Peregrinus a day ago | parent | prev [-]

There's no such thing as a license to download. Downloads are requested, it's the sending server that's responsible for making the copy.

	▲	impossiblefork 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe, maybe not. But in navigating to the page being requested the user may have agreed to something, and that may be a contract.

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ProblemExplorer a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> but this looks like Meta lawyers trying to shield themselves against partners' suing them

it's less about getting sued and more about not being blocked from being able to scrape.

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fluidcruft a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Even if you don't actually need a license, I would assume that making it an explicit term of the contract makes the dispute shorter.

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consensus1 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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win311fwg a day ago | parent | prev [-]

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.