São Paulo Judge Bars Meta From Scraping News Outlets’ Sites to Train AI and Suspends Its New Terms

A São Paulo judge has granted an injunction that suspends part of Meta’s new commercial terms for media companies and bars it from collecting news content to train AI without authorisation, Poder360 reported on November 3. Judge Guilherme Madeira Dezem of the 44th Civil Court of the Central Civil Forum ruled in a case brought by ABERT, the broadcasters’ association, ANJ, which represents newspapers, and ANER, the magazine publishers’ association.

The new terms, due to take effect on November 20, would have let Meta use automated programs to access, copy, store and analyse reports, photographs, videos and other material published on outlets’ own websites, including copyrighted work published outside Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads. The associations said continued use of the platforms was tied to accepting those conditions. The judge ordered Meta not to require outlets to authorise automatic collection as a condition for keeping their accounts, to keep the associations’ accounts, pages, groups and tools running, and not to treat outlets that refuse the terms differently or retaliate against them. He also barred Meta from using, or letting third parties use, bots and crawlers to collect the associations’ content to train its AI systems.

Non-compliance carries a daily fine of R$1 million, initially capped at R$100 million. The injunction is provisional, and the associations have 30 working days to file the main claim. Meta told Poder360 it would not comment. ANJ executive president Marcelo Rech called the decision a first step towards platforms and AI models refraining from taking third-party content without permission.

What it means in practice

The associations described the ruling as the first known decision in favour of a coalition of media associations against Meta’s contract changes; a Norwegian court had temporarily suspended the same rules on October 28 after a suit by ten media groups. Brazilian courts have been active on AI and platforms in recent weeks, from the TSE’s order to remove an unlabelled AI video before the runoff to a São Paulo ruling against Jusbrasil over an AI instruction.

What to watch is whether Meta appeals, whether it postpones the November 20 changes in Brazil, and how the main case frames copyright protection for journalism used to train AI.