Brazilian court restricts Meta’s use of news content for AI

Judge Guilherme Madeira Dezem suspended provisions of Meta’s Commercial Terms in a case brought jointly by ANJ, Abert and Aner against Meta’s Brazilian subsidiary.[4][3] The ruling prevents Meta from using material from the covered outlets to develop or train AI systems, including Meta AI.[2] It also prohibits the company from using bots to collect news articles, photographs, videos and other content from those outlets.[2] The court ordered Meta to keep the affiliated media outlets’ accounts, pages and tools operational, without penalizing outlets that reject the terms.[3]

The injunction suspends Meta’s new commercial terms, which were due to take effect on Nov. 20.[3] Those terms would have allowed automated programs to access, copy, store and analyze content on news organizations’ websites.[3] They sought permission to use content from outside Meta’s platforms, including copyrighted material, and made continued use of Meta’s platforms conditional on accepting them.[3] The court had blocked implementation of the new terms on Oct. 28.[3] The injunction now stays in force until a final judgment in the case.[3]

The judge found indications of copyright infringement and abusive contractual terms in Meta’s rules.[3] The judge said that scraping news websites to feed language models reproduces copyrighted works and requires prior authorization.[2] The judge also said Brazilian law has no exception for data mining for commercial purposes.[2] Those are the court’s stated grounds; the evidence provided does not establish a final ruling on the underlying claims.[3] For teams assessing the decision, the order’s stated scope is the covered outlets and the suspended terms, rather than a general rule about every source of AI training material.[2][3]

The court imposed a fine of R$1 million per day for noncompliance, capped at R$100 million; Folha reported those figures as about $182,400 per day and an $18 million cap.[3][2] Meta has five days to challenge the ruling, while the associations have 30 business days to file their main claim.[2] Meta was not heard before the ruling and said it would not comment.[2] ANJ executive president Marcelo Rech called the injunction historic and said it showed limits to platforms’ abuse of economic power.[2]