The key facts

  • Norway's largest media companies have turned to the Oslo District Court demanding a suspension of Meta's new commercial terms
  • The publishers fear the terms would allow Meta to collect articles, photos and videos to develop its products
  • Meta previously removed from the terms the mention of using collected materials to train AI models

Media companies demand a suspension of Meta's new terms

Major Norwegian media companies have turned to the Oslo District Court demanding that Meta's new commercial terms be suspended pending a judicial review of their legality. This was reported by the broadcaster NRK. The lawsuit involves NRK, TV 2, Schibsted, Amedia, Polaris, Aller, DN, Mentor Medier, NTB and Hordaland Folkeblad — members of the Norwegian Media Association (MBL). In their view, the new terms would give Meta the right to collect every article, photograph and video published by editorial media outlets.

Publishers' concerns and Meta's position

MBL chairwoman Lene Eltvik Vinnfeld said the terms must be assessed for compliance with Norwegian law. NRK's legal director Olav Nyhus said the company does not want Meta to use their content to strengthen platforms such as Facebook and Instagram 'under any circumstances.' At the same time, he acknowledged that terminating agreements with these platforms would not be easy, since they have become important channels for distributing information. 'What Meta is doing destroys the entire financial foundation of journalism,' Nyhus added, calling Meta's conduct and terms 'a clear violation of competition law.'

What has changed in Meta's terms

Meta recently revised its commercial terms, removing wording that had raised concerns about the possible use of news sites for training artificial intelligence models. Earlier, a draft of the terms spoke of using collected materials to 'train' Meta's products, which caused concern among publishers and lawyers due to the potential use of copyright-protected news material for AI development. The updated version states that automatic crawling of websites is intended for developing, improving, researching and maintaining advertising and business products. At the same time, the provisions still allow Meta to use automated tools, including web scrapers, bots and crawlers, to access the content of websites of companies using its platforms.