Meta’s new commercial terms will allow the scraping of news sites: experts
niemanlab.orgThose are certainly among the most interesting engineers. For example, what were the American Founding Fathers, if not "legal engineers" (and certainly many of them were also "financial engineers", given this was one of their most pressing needs).
I guess if you find yourself preferring the status quo all the time they might be scary but given I can't think of any time in history where the status quo was totally desirable I'm not sure what there is to be scared of exactly.
Could you be more specific?
They're shifty fuckers enabling greedy scummy fuckers to make everything shittier forever for everyone in the world except themselves.
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?
> "[T]hey'll give people some freedom, but essentially it will be 20th-century capitalism: a corporate elite protected by laws and tax-codes."
Most people don't care about the Terms of Service. Would you have a more positive assessment of the judicial system if it infantilized its citizens? If someone doesn't read it the first time or ignores an email what is the system supposed to do? Stand over your shoulder and make you read it? Do you want citizens to be prosecuted for signing things on the theory they didn't actually read them?
What number of people actually read the terms, actually read the new terms, decide they don't like the new terms, but after caring this much decide they don't want to "opt out" (I'm still not clear what remedy you want to invent for this)? Do you think this number is so high that you should be shocked that for some reason this is not a priority? I'm not even sure you've actually articulated a problem.
Is there a Terms of Service change you find particularly offensive that might better explain your concerns here? If so, I would be interested to hear you describe it with greater specificity.
If the TOS changes you should be automatically opted out until you explicitly accept the new agreement
That way if you stop using the service because of the new TOS, it actually means your old activity is still bound by the previous TOS not the new one. Weird how that's never an option though.
Does it not work this way? Don't the terms you sign often say something like these terms can be updated at any time? Yet they still often want you to agree to the new terms to proceed, right?
> That way if you stop using the service because of the new TOS, it actually means your old activity is still bound by the previous TOS not the new one.
Are you suggesting a statutory remedy? What is the average diff of a terms change? Are they really that meaningful? I would think the scope of what they can actually change is controlled by various other areas of law. If you don't accept the new terms are you concerned your old data is going to be used in a new way, while you remain opted out of the future? Is that actually how it works? It feels like it would not, which I gather is why they often want you to explicitly accept the new terms.
Once again it would be helpful if a specific change or event was brought up here that better explained your concerns. I feel like there are times when I am forced to agree to new terms to continue using the service, and other times where it feels like I am not. I would suspect this relates to some controlling law regarding the nature of the update itself, as not all updates are equally meaningful?
If I stand outside your house and follow you all day recording your every moment in a public space, is that legal or has that turned into harassment? Certainly in many countries, filming an incidental person may be legal but filming them in detail and from every angle is not (eg upskirting)
Because the scrapes become more interesting once combined with such information.
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?
What happens if the publisher has a license granted by their tier1 but their tier1 can’t 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.
The publisher using stock images does have the right to transmit those images to visitors. Those visitors don't have the right to incorporate the images into their own public work that they rebroadcast. But Meta isn't asking for that; they want consent from the business to scrape. The subsequent copyright violation is then a matter between Meta and the vendor of the stock images.
Imagine someone asks you: see that guy across the street? Do I have your consent to search his pockets? If you say yes, what does it mean? Precisely nothing.
Suppose you are asked: do I have your consent to search the pockets of everyone in this neighborhood? If you say yes, it still means nothing with regard to the guy across the street, who has not given any constent, but you've consented to your pockets being searched.
I think if you have some kind of authority over the place where this happens and/or if you facilitate an illegal action then you could be breaking the law.
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.
- 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.
Also, this is about crawling and has little to do with the license of the contents.
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)
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.
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.
(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)
Well, assuming, y'know, justice under the law and such.
Then check your logs and start sending appropriate invoices.
Then after 1yr of unpaid invoices: <profit>
There isn't even a veil of "customer satisfaction is important" anymore.
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.
Oddly enough, many don't seem to want to have a company homepage, in particular smaller companies.