Copyright Alliance calls Meta's proposed Commercial Terms 'unconscionable' and urges withdrawal

What happened

The Copyright Alliance, a US non-profit that says it represents over two million individual creators and over 15,000 organisations, issued a statement on 27 October 2026 about Meta's planned update to its business-related Terms of Service (TOS), due to take effect on 20 November 2026 across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Threads and WhatsApp. The Alliance said the changes appear to authorise Meta to scrape and use websites and other content from commercial account holders for Meta's business products, including to train and ground Meta's AI products, with no opt-out option: the only way to avoid the terms would be to sever the business relationship with Meta and its audience.

What the Alliance said

Copyright Alliance CEO Keith Kupferschmid called the proposed terms "unconscionable". He said they could allow Meta to scrape any business user's content, much of it protected by copyright, and use it in Meta's own business products, including for advertising and to train and ground its AI products. He said Meta's additional changes in response to objections did not ameliorate the Alliance's concerns: the revised terms still allow broad scraping of websites and unjustified exploitation of content for generative AI purposes, and allow Meta to ignore or circumvent protocols such as robots.txt that signal a request to disallow scraping.

Kupferschmid said the issue is not only a news-media issue, because virtually every organisation in the creative industries has a Meta business account to manage pages, accounts, profiles and channels, so photographers, newspapers, artists and other businesses and creators with online content would be adversely affected. With no ability to opt out, he said, account holders would have to accept the terms or individually terminate essential commercial accounts, which he said is extremely difficult given Meta's market power. The Alliance strongly urged Meta to withdraw the changes and address the concerns raised by the Alliance and others.

Limits of this item

This item reports the Copyright Alliance's advocacy statement only. The statement quotes no response from Meta, and it makes no finding about what the terms will in fact permit: the statement itself says the changes "appear to" authorise the uses described. The statement is the latest in a series of association and regulator responses to the same Meta Commercial Terms update; it is distinct as the first statement in that series from a US creators' coalition speaking for individual creators across copyright disciplines, rather than from news publishers or public-service media.