法律专家称 Meta 修订商业条款后其 AI 仍可能抓取新闻网站
Meta’s AI could still scrape news sites, legal experts say
- 1Meta 修订商业条款，删除用网站内容“训练”AI 产品的表述，新条款 10 月 30 日生效
- 2康奈尔法学院教授称“与你的产品或服务相关”措辞仍可让 Meta 抓取整个网站
- 3知识产权律师认为修订版仍允许用抓取内容开发“商业产品”，“开发”一词可涵盖训练
- 4Meta 发言人回应称更新并非为免费抓取新闻内容，内容方可用 robots.txt 表达偏好
平台商业条款的措辞调整难以化解 AI 训练数据争议，删除“训练”字样后“开发”等宽泛表述仍为抓取和训练留有解释空间。
- 影响：依赖 robots.txt 阻止抓取的内容方需重新评估其约束力，因为商业条款是否覆盖此类拦截信号存在法律争议；与企业账号关联的网站内容面临被平台产品开发使用的敞口；条款 10 月 30 日生效前是调整网站关联安排的时间窗口。
- 参考：内容依赖型业务可考虑在条款生效前梳理与企业账号关联的域名和内容清单，评估退出或迁移选项；值得核查 robots.txt 之外是否需要合同层面的抓取限制；可考虑参考出版业向平台表达异议的做法。
- 依据：专家批评来自 Nieman Lab 采访的康奈尔法学院教授与知识产权律师；Meta 发言人向 The Verge 重申条款并非为抓取新闻内容，双方说法对立，尚无司法结论。
Emma Roth
is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.
Meta has tweaked its business terms to remove language suggesting that it could freely train its AI models on news sites, like The Verge — but legal experts say these changes aren’t enough to address their concerns. “This does nothing to restrict the ‘associated with your products or services’ [language] that would let Meta scrape entire sites,” James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, tells Nieman Lab.
Initially, Meta’s new terms for business accounts appeared to give the company permission to train its AI on news sites. The terms, which go into effect October 30th, stated that Meta “may use any content” from the websites associated with a business account to “develop, research” and “train” Meta’s products. At the time, legal experts told Nieman Lab that this could allow Meta “to argue its commercial terms supersede other blocking instructions,” such as the robots.txt file that has historically told scrapers (including search engines like Google) what they are allowed to crawl.
Following fierce backlash from the publishing industry, Meta removed language saying it would “train” its products with scraped content. But the tweaks might not be enough to rule out that possibility. “The revised version of the new terms still allows Meta to use that scraped content to develop any ‘business product.’ That doesn’t seem to be a defined term, and presumably Meta is developing AI business products. I think ‘develop’ is broad enough to include ‘train,’” Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy, tells Nieman Lab.
Meta has maintained that its new terms aren’t designed to scrape news content for free. In a statement to The Verge today, Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts reiterated that “content owners can use robots.txt to signal their preferences,” adding that the update “is not about scraping news sites, and these updates don’t give us new rights that supersede those preferences.”
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- Emma Roth
来源：The Verge · AI · theverge.com