Brazilian media win first round against Meta over AI training demand

Sao Paulo, Brazil - A Sao Paulo state court issued an injunction on Tuesday ordering US tech giant Meta to cease collecting content from Brazilian media outlets for use in training its AI models. The decision follows a civil lawsuit filed by three national press associations, who accused Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Whatsapp, of demanding free access to media content.

This came after Meta added a requirement to its new terms of service for businesses, effective November 20, that demanded free access to media content in exchange for continued platform usage. Judge Guilherme Madeira Dezem set a daily fine of one million reais (approximately US$180,000 or RM733,000) if Meta refuses to comply. Given the tight timeline, the judge made his ruling without awaiting a response from the company.

He deemed the forced surrender of copyrighted works to Meta by the media outlets as a "manifest abuse of rights" that would result in irreversible damage to their businesses. The judge suspended that section of the new terms of service and barred Meta from penalizing media outlets that refuse to comply. Meta has five days from the ruling to present its defense.

The company has yet to respond to AFP's request for comment. Marcelo Rech, the executive president of the National Association of Newspapers (ANJ), hailed the ruling as a "very positive sign" that there are limits to the abuse of economic power. The associations stated that this marks the first time in any country that a coalition of media organizations has won a case against Meta's new terms of service.