Copyright Alliance warns creative firms about Meta’s new terms of service

The Copyright Alliance warned that Meta's revised commercial terms of service, due to take effect in November, still permit broad scraping of business-account websites and allow Meta to ignore or circumvent protocols like robots.txt, according to CEO Keith Kupferschmid. Kupferschmid said the impact extends beyond news media to photographers, newspapers, artists and virtually every creative-industry organization with a Meta business account on Facebook, Instagram, Threads or WhatsApp. Meta communications executive Andy Stone disputed the original criticism, saying "There's no change to how Meta uses web crawlers," and The Verge reported Meta removed the specific section of the new terms relating to scraping, but the Copyright Alliance says those tweaks are insufficient.

Meta has been taking some heat recently for an imminent change to the terms of service for its business accounts – that’s anyone using Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp as a business rather than an individual. The heat is due to new terms that seemingly allow Meta free rein to scrape content from the websites of those businesses and use it to train its AI models. Initially, it was the news-publishing industry raising the alarm about this: see Nieman Lab’s article from mid-October for a summary of those concerns https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/metas-new-commercial-terms-will-allow-the-scraping-of-news-sites-legal-experts-say/ . Now Copyright Alliance, which represents the wider creative industries including music, has weighed in with its own warning https://copyrightalliance.org/press-releases/meta-proposed-commercial-tos-updates/ , including the potential impact beyond news. While Meta has made changes to its proposed terms, the CA says they’re not enough. “The revised terms continue to allow for broad scraping of websites and unjustified exploitation of content for generative AI purposes. They also allow Meta to ignore or circumvent protocols like robots.txt used to indicate a request to disallow scraping,” claimed CEO Keith Kupferschmid. “This is not just a news media issue. Virtually every organisation in the creative industry and most other industries has a business account with Meta to enable them to manage Facebook pages, Threads accounts, Instagram profiles, and WhatsApp channels,” he added. “The negative impact of Meta’s updated commercial terms would be so far-reaching that all businesses and creators with online content, such as photographers, newspapers, artists, you name it, would be adversely affected.” Meta has pushed back hard against the original criticism – “This is false. There’s no change to how Meta uses web crawlers,” tweeted its comms exec Andy Stone https://x.com/andymstone/status/2111101865769201850 earlier this month. The Verge then reported that Meta was removing the specific section of the new terms that relates to scraping https://www.theverge.com/tech/1013409/meta-removes-language-that-may-have-allowed-it-to-scrape-news-sites . But, according to Copyright Alliance, those tweaks are not allaying fears ahead of the new terms’ introduction in November. Keep a close eye on this one.