AI law and the newsroom, November 3–4: a São Paulo court suspends Meta's 20 November terms and backs the ban with a R$1 million daily fine (2026)

This issue carries one item. It is dated 3 November 2026 and comes from Brazil, where a São Paulo court stopped the commercial terms Meta was due to put to publishers on 20 November.

The same terms are before a court in Norway and regulators in Britain and Brussels. This digest reported those proceedings on 29 October, 30 October and 3 November, and does not repeat them here. What follows is the Brazilian order: what it commands, whom it binds, and what it leaves standing.

Brazil: the terms due on 20 November, suspended

The order was granted on 3 November by the 44th Civil Court of the Central Civil Forum in São Paulo, in a precautionary action brought before the main claim. 1

Three associations brought it: ANJ for newspapers, ABERT for radio and television, and ANER for magazine publishers. The defendant is Meta's Brazilian company, Facebook Serviços Online do Brasil Ltda. 1

Judge Guilherme Madeira Dezem signed it at 15:36 São Paulo time, without hearing Meta first. 1

The first operative paragraph suspends the final part of Clause 1 of Meta's updated Commercial Terms, which were to take effect on 20 November 2026. 1

The suspended words are the licence publishers were to give Meta: permission for automated software, web scrapers, bots, spiders and crawlers, to reach and copy their own websites. 1

The second paragraph goes further than the clause. Meta must keep the associations' members' accounts, pages, groups and tools working on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads. 1

It may not give those outlets different, restrictive, punitive or retaliatory treatment because they refused the new terms. 1

The third paragraph is the one about AI. Meta may not use, or let third parties use in its name, any scraping software or test credentials against the members' domains, pages or URLs. 1

It may not use their protected works to provide, develop, research, maintain, train, fine-tune or feed its AI systems, Meta AI named among them. 1

Both bans run until the main case is finally decided. 1

Who must comply: Facebook Serviços Online do Brasil, from notification, until final judgment. 1

Status: binding now, provisional, and open to challenge. Meta has five days from citation to contest, and if it does not contest, the facts pleaded are presumed true. 1

The associations then have 30 business days, counted from the order taking effect, to file the main claim. 1

Breaking any of the orders costs R$1 million a day, capped at R$100 million, and the court reserved the right to add other measures. 1

The judge gave a reason for that figure. Meta, he wrote, "has shown itself especially reluctant to comply with decisions issued in other cases, choosing when to comply and when not to". 1

Meta declined to comment on the decision, UOL reported. 2 It did not answer AFP's request for comment either. 3

Scope: the order covers outlets associated with the three associations. Publishers outside them stay subject to the terms, and 20 November is still the date for them. 1

The claim of firstness, and what it is worth

ANJ called the ruling the first known judicial decision in the world granted to a coalition of media associations against these rule changes. 4

A Norwegian court reached the same ground six days earlier. On 28 October the Oslo District Court barred Meta from putting the terms into force in Norway. 5

The applicants there were ten companies, among them NRK, TV 2, Schibsted, Amedia and NTB, acting through their association, MBL. 6

So the two orders differ in who asked and in what they do. Oslo stopped the terms from entering into force and ordered Meta to pay 1.2 million kroner in costs. 5

São Paulo suspended the clause, barred the scraping and the training outright, and put a daily fine behind each command. 1

Both statements can stand. The Brazilian order adds a daily fine and an express ban on training; the Norwegian order came first.

The reasoning a publisher elsewhere can borrow

The court first refused to let the contract send Brazilian disputes to California. Item 6.d of the terms elects the Northern District of California or a court in San Mateo County. 1

The judge held that clause abusive in a standard-form contract imposed on companies operating in Brazil, and kept the case in São Paulo. 1

On copyright, he treated scraping, tokenising and storing for training as reproduction under Brazil's copyright law, articles 28, 29 and 31. 1

Article 31 carries the point that travels: permission for one use does not extend to another, and a work being free to read online does not put it in the public domain. 1

He found no general text-and-data-mining exception in Brazilian law, and read the exceptions in article 46 against the three-step tests in Berne and TRIPS. 1

On contract, he fastened on item 7, under which continued use of the platforms after notice counts as full and irrevocable acceptance. 1

That construction leaves a publisher no way to refuse the scraping and keep its account. The judge said it voids an advance waiver under article 424 of the Civil Code. 1

He also found the clause impossible to perform. It made publishers warrant rights over everything on their sites, including agency photographs they cannot license for training. 1

Two passages belong in any newsroom's file on this argument. The first concerns robots.txt, which the court described as a technical signal with no binding force. 1

The second concerns timing. Once text is inside a model's weights, the judge wrote, it cannot be segregated, audited or removed later. 1

The order also records the drafting history, which matters to anyone reading Meta's current text. 1

The version shown to users on 16 October 2026 said the collection was meant to "train" the systems. 1

The revision of 19 October removed the word. The judge found the extraction machinery intact, and item 5 still provides for generative AI features. 1

What the order does not do

It does not license anything, set a rate, or award damages. For the associations' members it restores the terms in force before the change. 1

It does not decide the copyright case. It finds the claim plausible enough to hold the position until trial. 1

It does not bind Meta outside Brazil, and it does not lift the 20 November date in any other market. 1

Meta told NRK it would postpone the terms if its consultation with publishers runs past 20 November, which would move the date everywhere. 5

That statement is a promise, not an order. As of this issue Meta has not put a new date on its terms.

The compliance clock

Date	What happens	Who it binds	Source
10 November 2026	The European Commission's consultation on technology and copyright closes	Anyone who chooses to respond	European Commission
20 November 2026	Meta's updated Commercial Terms take effect for business accounts, except those covered by the São Paulo order	Meta, and every business account outside the three associations	São Paulo order
2 December 2026	EU AI Act: Article 5(1) points (ba) and (bb), and Articles 5(1a) and (1b), begin to apply	Providers and deployers of the systems those provisions name	Article 113
3 December 2026	Google must give publishers per-publisher AI impressions, clicks and click-through rate	Google, for outputs shown to users in the United Kingdom	Competition and Markets Authority
3 January 2027	Google's first compliance report to the CMA, covering 3 June to 3 December 2026, falls due	Google	Competition and Markets Authority
Early February 2027	Three months from service of the Turkish decision end, and fines can begin	The five Google entities	Rekabet Kurulu
3 March 2027	The page-level control in paragraph 4(b) of the British requirement comes into force	Google	Competition and Markets Authority

The next hard dates

The order starts two clocks, and both belong to the parties: Meta's five days to contest and the associations' 30 business days to file the main claim. 1

For a newsroom elsewhere, the date that still matters is 20 November. Unless Meta moves it, terms a court has now suspended in two countries will bind publishers almost everywhere else. 1 5

The Brazilian order stands until the main case is decided, and it can be challenged before then. 1

References