I don’t really understand the legal theory here. Party A (Meta) writes a contract with Party B (a business account holder) ostensibly granting A the right to scrape B’s website and a license to the content.
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?
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?
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.
But Meta is not asking for anything of the sort, like you must assign to us the rights to use stock images. Just consent to the scraping activity.
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.
This is some next level legal judo. Say what you want about the metaverse or muse, but it's clear that Meta is still innovating when it comes to its Terms of Service.
Those 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.
These are two types of engineers that, at some places, aim to find loopholes that immensely help themselves while immensely hurting others, maybe as collateral, maybe by design. The fact that you’re so gung-ho about this…is alarming.
My interpretation was that they’re referring to legal/financial engineers in the context of corporate butheshareholderism, where rather than trying to e.g. build a good nation, the goal is to maximize profits.
That's a bold move. I imagine a lot of businesses will leave Meta over this. And if their gamble pays off, and businesses can't afford not to advertise on Meta platforms, then there is probably a good antitrust case for them abusing their oligopoly power.
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 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.
I assume this is because of Muse? A lot of businesses block bots which stops Muse from being able to buy from those websites on a user's behalf. It seems like that'd be good for the businesses too.
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 that they let businesses change the license at any time, with just an email notification, and the only way to opt out of the new terms is to stop using the service.
How else would you "opt out"? You want to have your cake and eat it too?
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.
As a business owner who has meta accounts and even advertises on meta, I have long since blocked their crawler traffic. They try to hide their scraper traffic dishonestly behind user agents that purport to be Facebook users browsing the web via their Facebook browser, the thing is, I know it’s a lie because there is absolutely no reason for 1000s of Facebook users from Ireland to want to know anything about a small local business in Canada, that only services local clients within 50km radius due to the nature of the business. So I know it’s a lie, therefore was blocked. And guess what, fuck your terms of service the blocks are staying in place.
This company is poison. You have built a few things people liked, bought some other things people really liked, and then used that good will to completely screw over the entire internet.
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?
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.
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.
Those 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?
Because the scrapes become more interesting once combined with such information.
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.
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.
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?