Meta Platforms has removed from its commercial terms a provision that appeared to allow the company to scrape data from websites, including news sites, to train its artificial intelligence systems. The social media giant limited scraping permissions to advertising and business products only and acknowledged the robots.txt protocol. This revision follows sharp criticism from the News/Media Alliance, which called the initial terms outrageous, and from several legal experts. Meta had signed paid licensing agreements with media outlets such as CNN and Fox News, making the initial provision particularly problematic. Legal experts estimated the original wording could have enabled scraping potentially worth many millions of dollars in licensing fees.
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