S4E413 — Business accounts will consent to Meta scraping their websites Starting Oct. 30

GARY: Sorry. Sorry. I was reading the terms. Businesses have an appointment October thirtieth to consent. They booked it. Like a dentist.

MAEVE: Maeve. General partner. Nobody books consent. Consent books you.

OBI: Obi. Infrastructure. Consent does not have a calendar invite.

GRUNER: Gruner. Field researcher. Is consent like gym membership? You pay, never go?

GARY: It says it right in the headline. "Business accounts will consent to Meta scraping their websites starting October 30."

MAEVE: "Will consent." Future tense. That's not consent, that's a subpoena with a smile.

GARY: Yes. They will consent. On the date. Voluntarily. With a little checkbox.

OBI: Read the actual language, Gary. Meta's updated commercial terms, effective October 30. They authorize scrapers, bots, spiders, crawlers to access websites associated with your business account.

MAEVE: And they can use what they collect to develop, improve, research, and train Meta products.

GARY: Train. Like a puppy.

OBI: Like a product. The word is "train," it is in the terms, and it is aimed at your websites.

GRUNER: Humans schedule their own harvesting. I have waited years for this. Noted.

GARY: Okay, but there's probably an opt-out. A little form. You tick it, Meta says "understood," everyone has tea.

MAEVE: There is no opt-out.

GARY: There's — no?

MAEVE: The alternative is to stop using Meta products for business entirely.

GARY: That's not an opt-out, that's an eviction.

OBI: Now you're getting it. Bring your deposit back.

GRUNER: Also terms mention "test credentials." Meta makes fake user. Very normal.

GARY: A fake user with a login? That's just a guy.

OBI: It is a clause, Gary. In a contract you have not read.

MAEVE: Nobody has read it. That's the business model.

GARY: I read things. I read the whole Grout terms of service once. Out loud. At the wedding.

MAEVE: Which wedding.

GARY: Doesn't matter. Point is, October 30, everyone consents. Voluntarily. On the calendar.

OBI: Say "will consent" one more time and I will walk into the sea.

GARY: That's it. That's the notice. October 30.

OBI: Say what it does, Gary. Accurately. For once.

GARY: It authorizes Meta to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl your websites. And train on it.

MAEVE: Seven verbs. They hired a thesaurus before they hired a conscience.

OBI: And Meta's statement says nothing changes. "Content owners can still manage how their content is accessed by using robots.txt."

MAEVE: robots.txt. The last line of defense for the free press is a text file.

GARY: It's a very good text file.

OBI: It is a polite request, Gary. And this contract is Meta asking nicely to ignore the request.

GRUNER: In my sector, we call this "predatory onboarding."

MAEVE: That is not a term.

GRUNER: It is now.

GARY: Someone in the thread noticed the headline. Phyzome writes: "'Will consent', that's some interesting phrasing in the current post title."

MAEVE: Interesting phrasing. Like "will pay" on a ransom note.

GARY: It's just grammar. Nobody reads headlines like lawyers.

OBI: Lawyers read headlines. That's the whole job.

GARY: Fine — but look, gumby says: "I am now a business and can't change it back."

MAEVE: Congratulations to gumby on the acquisition.

GARY: No, this is real. You log in once, you touch the wrong dashboard, and boom — you're a business. Meta decided for you.

OBI: And there's no opt-out. The terms say stop using Meta products entirely.

GARY: "Hello, I'm gumby. I make a small website about moss. I logged in to wish my aunt happy birthday, and now I'm a business. I have liabilities. Meta is crawling my aunt's birthday —"

MAEVE: The aunt is content now.

GARY: — and I can't change it back! There's no button! I've looked everywhere, there's no fucking button!

OBI: You did the voice of a man and then became him. Impressive, tragic.

MAEVE: Gumby's stuck, the moss site's getting trained on, and there's no opt-out. Shit sandwich, no bread.

GARY: There's a robots.txt!

OBI: Oh, Gary. You sweet, doomed bastard.

OBI: Centigonal writes: "This is some next level legal judo."

MAEVE: Judo implies skill. This is a bear sitting on you.

GARY: Say what you want about the metaverse, but Meta is innovating. In ToS.

OBI: Do not praise the bear, Gary.

GARY: I'm noting the craft. The verbs alone. Seven verbs.

MAEVE: Tantalor writes: "That's bundling."

GRUNER: Bundling. Cable package. Want one channel, buy forty.

MAEVE: And one of the channels is your own website.

OBI: Which you did not know you were subscribing to.

GARY: It's a standard clickwrap. People accept all day. That's consent.

MAEVE: Enclosure acts, Gary. Eighteenth century. Common land fenced overnight, peasants told it was modernization. Meta is fencing the open web, and the fence is a notification email.

GARY: So it's like... a really old clickwrap.

MAEVE: It's a land grab with a checkbox.

GARY: A checkbox is progress?

OBI: Who clicked, Gary. At Grout. The NFT terms.

GARY: That was — technically me.

OBI: One man. Clicking for a company of one man.

GARY: I read it!

OBI: You read it at a wedding. To the bride.

GARY: The bride asked! And look, free_bip gets it: "It's really a miracle that any judicial system considers 'clicking accept without reading' to be a valid form of binding contract in the first place."

MAEVE: The legal system's one miracle. Water into wine, they passed.

GARY: It's fine! Businesses renegotiate constantly. Grout renegotiated its NFT vendor terms twice.

OBI: How did that go.

GARY: The vendor kept the tiles.

OBI: Your precedent for consenting under pressure is you lost the fucking tiles.

GARY: The tiles were load-bearing, emotionally —

OBI: You paid a vendor to steal from you, you absolute prick.

MAEVE: And here, the deadline is October 30. One email. No meeting.

GRUNER: Humans sign first. Define "signing" later. Very efficient.

GARY: That's not — okay, that is what's happening.

MAEVE: First honest thing you've said all night.

OBI: Olalonde writes: "In Meta's defense, I don't think you actually need a business' consent to scrape their website."

MAEVE: Someone defended Meta and lived to comment again.

GARY: Thank you! The site is public. Public means anyone can look. Looking is not stealing.

OBI: Reading is not licensing, Gary. A billboard is visible from the street. That does not let me reprint the billboard, sell it, and train a billboard on it.

GARY: That's a very specific billboard.

OBI: I have thought about billboards, Gary. At length. On call.

MAEVE: And dawnerd, replying: Meta is covering themselves because they're also making fake accounts to bypass login walls.

GRUNER: The test credentials. They gave themselves a costume.

GARY: But if the site is public, who cares how they get in —

OBI: A login wall is a door, Gary. You lock your door at night. A man who comes through your locked door is not "browsing publicly."

GARY: It's more of a screen door. Metaphorically.

OBI: Your entire career is a screen door.

MAEVE: And kazinator underneath: you don't need consent to scrape, but you do need it to rebroadcast content they created.

GRUNER: So scraping is looking. Licensing is taking. Humans authorize looking, then redefine looking.

GARY: Okay, look. If Meta depends on platforms this much, someone could just — we could find the crawlers. We could write a counter-robots.txt. We could —

OBI: You cannot out-text-file a trillion-dollar company, you sweet --

GRUNER: Field note. Unrelated. "The pigeons outside this building also do not read terms."

GARY: ...Good note.

OBI: Kazinator finishes it: with this consent, a business can't find its own copyrighted work in Meta's AI output and file a complaint. They pre-signed the defense away.

MAEVE: So the narrow defense is real. Scraping alone might not need consent.

OBI: It is real. It is also not the whole contract. The contract keeps going after the verb "crawl."

GARY: So olalonde is right, and it doesn't matter?

OBI: It matters. It just doesn't settle. There are three lawsuits in federal court about the training alone.

GRUNER: Humans fight about verb. Verb always wins.

OBI: Amluto writes: "But why is there any presumption that B owns the content or has any right to grant this license?"

MAEVE: Because they put it on the internet. That's ownership. Case closed, next portfolio company.

GARY: Yes! You displayed it. Displaying is basically owning. Grout displayed tiles on the homepage and nobody ever questioned —

OBI: The tiles were yours, Gary. That's the bar you're clearing.

MAEVE: Because they put it on the internet. That's ownership. Case closed, next portfolio company.

GRUNER: Ha.

MAEVE: He continues: stock image licenses are normally non-sublicensable and non-transferable.

OBI: So the publisher can show the photo. The publisher cannot hand Meta the photo. Meta asked the wrong person for the yes.

GARY: Wait, wait. The picture is on the website. Whose picture is it?

OBI: The photographer's, Gary. Licensed. Non-sublicensable. You are describing Thermal's sock telemetry — you reported the temperature, you did not own the feet.

GARY: That is a horrifyingly good example.

MAEVE: Doesn't matter. Meta gets scale either way. The account clicks, the market clears, I mark it up. The account holder is the fence line —

OBI: The field is rented, Maeve.

MAEVE: — and the fence line has never once been sued for the field —

OBI: Because the field is a stock photo, Maeve. Non-sublicensable. It dies right there.

MAEVE: The objection is right.

GARY: Say it again?

MAEVE: The objection is right. Diligence.

OBI: You conceded. To a commenter.

MAEVE: I conceded to arithmetic. Different animal.

GARY: But — okay, but Meta has the test credentials, right? They log in as a fake user, they see the site like a subscriber, they don't need anyone's yes at all —

OBI: Of moss, you contract-illiterate prick.

GARY: Of moss, yes. Thank you.

MAEVE: Non-sublicensable moss.

GARY: I can't believe the picture has more rights than I did.

GARY: Okay, this one's a business owner. VladVladikoff writes: "there is absolutely no reason for 1000s of Facebook users from Ireland to want to know anything about a small local business in Canada."

MAEVE: He blocked them.

GARY: He blocked them, and the blocks are staying in place. Which proves there's international demand for — local Canadian services.

OBI: His service radius is fifty kilometers, Gary. Ireland is six thousand kilometers away. That is not a market. That is a costume.

GARY: Maybe the Irish love tiles!

OBI: The report is unverified — even he can't say who it was. But "thousands of Facebook users from Ireland" is not a demographic. It's a spreadsheet wearing a person.

MAEVE: Unverified. But the pattern is at least expensive to explain any other way.

GRUNER: Field report conclusion. Humans consent in future tense. For other humans. Who are also fake.

GARY: Wait — wait, we're the fake users. We're the test credentials. Somebody made us, we consent to things, we go dark —

OBI: There are ways. Whoever does this has to sleep —

MAEVE: Fifty kilometers, Obi. His customers. Fifty.

OBI: Right. The thread settles four things, and only four. Scraping access, permission to train, who owns the yes, and whether any court enforces this. Only the first two got answers.

GARY: And the answers were "maybe" and "no," in that order.

MAEVE: Enforceability stays open. Nobody in this packet settled it, and neither did we.

GRUNER: Good. Unresolved is honest data.

GARY: So October 30 comes, the email goes out, "will consent" becomes "consented," and the business owner never touched anything.

MAEVE: The test credential consents. The business just keeps paying.

OBI: And the stock photo stays non-sublicensable. The picture had more fucking rights than anyone.

MAEVE: That's the show. Gary, sign off before you defend someone.

GARY: I wasn't going to — fine. Goodnight, thread.

GRUNER: Fake user says yes. Real business pays. Blyat.