AI law and the newsroom, October 24–29: an Oslo court stops Meta's terms, Meta takes the date off the calendar, and Brussels keeps checking training data

This issue covers 24 to 29 October 2026, the gap since the last one, in three items. An Oslo court barred Meta from bringing its new commercial terms into force in Norway. Hours earlier, Meta had taken the date off the calendar everywhere. The European Commission said it now holds the replies to its questions to AI companies about model safety and copyright.

Three questions run through the items below. What date, if any, binds a newsroom now? What did the court in Oslo actually order, and over whom? Which office will ever tell you what your archive was used for?

Ten Norwegian media companies asked the Oslo District Court on Tuesday 27 October to stop Meta's new commercial terms from taking effect. 1 The ten are NRK, TV 2, Schibsted, Amedia, Polaris, Aller, the business daily DN, Mentor Medier, the national news agency NTB and the local paper Hordaland Folkeblad, and the Norwegian Media Businesses' Association, MBL, brought the request on their behalf. 2

The court granted it the next day, Wednesday 28 October. Its order reads: "Meta Platforms Ireland Limited is prohibited from implementing the change to Meta's commercial terms until the legality of the change has been finally determined." 3

Meta Platforms Ireland is the company in the contract. Meta's own terms route every commercial claim from a business user outside the United States to that entity and to Irish courts. 4

The court gave two reasons, as NTB reported them. The media houses "risk losing control over editorial content that has been built up over many years". 3 And the only cause of that risk is Meta's unilateral change, which leaves the applicants in a coercive position and hands Meta an extensive right to carry out text and data mining on a number of websites, including data behind paywalls. 3 MBL's board chair, Lene Eltvik Vindfeld, said the court agreed with the industry that Meta holds a dominant position in the relevant market and that the new terms are unreasonable. 2 That is the winning party's account of conclusions reached in a document nobody outside the case has read.

Meta was ordered to pay 1.2 million Norwegian kroner in costs. 3 NRK put the figure at over a million. 5

Four limits belong with that order, and each one decides how far a newsroom can lean on it.

The court issued the order without hearing Meta in a courtroom, and said so in the order itself. 3 The parties, and anyone the order affects, can demand an oral hearing afterwards. 3 Meta's side of the case has yet to be put to a Norwegian judge.

MBL's announcement carries no copy of the order. 2 The reasoning quoted above is the winning side's account of what the court wrote. Nothing in the published material shows how the court defined the relevant market, what it required the applicants to prove at this stage, or how firmly it reached each conclusion.

How far the order reaches is the one point the published accounts describe differently. MBL describes a bar on Meta implementing the changes; NRK describes a halt for Norwegian media houses; VG describes a halt for the affected Norwegian media companies. 256 Whether it reaches a Norwegian bookshop with a Facebook page, or a publisher in Stockholm, is a question the published material leaves open.

The order is interim relief, and it decides one thing: Meta may not bring the change into force in Norway while a court works out whether the change is lawful. It says nothing about a newsroom anywhere else, and it fixes no end date. The measure lasts until a judgment that is final.

Meta moved first, earlier the same Wednesday. "We've heard publishers' feedback on our proposed ads and business terms update," its vice-president of communications, Andy Stone, said on X. "We care deeply about our partners and do not plan to make policy changes without a full consultation with industry groups and leaders." 7

The rest of the statement carries the part that matters to a newsroom. "We expect this consultation could extend beyond November 20, in which case we'd delay implementation of the updated terms. Until then our existing terms remain in place." 7 Reuters reported the move as an indefinite delay. 7

The statement sets no end date for the consultation. It promises a conversation with "industry groups and leaders" and names none of them; Meta did not answer Nieman Lab's questions about which groups it intended to consult. 8 The statement undertakes no change to the wording, and crawling, paywalls and AI go unmentioned in it. 8

The instrument has moved less than the announcement. On Thursday 29 October, the preview page still read: "We're updating the Meta Commercial Terms. These updates will come into effect on 20 November 2026." 4 The page still closes with 20 November 2026 as the effective date. 4

The paragraph publishers object to is also still there, unchanged since it lost the word "train". It authorises Meta "to use automated software (such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers and user agents) and create test credentials to access, index, cache, analyse, collect, retrieve or crawl the domains, web pages or URLs ... associated with your products or services", and to do it "in order to provide, develop, improve, research and maintain advertising and business products ... and maintain the integrity and security of Meta Company Products". 4

That leaves a newsroom in one of three positions, and the position depends on where it publishes.

The revised terms are in force in no country. Meta's existing terms remain in place until it says otherwise, and Stone's statement is the only thing holding the new ones back. 7 The promise belongs to Meta, and a publisher holds nothing it can enforce from it.

In Norway, a court order sits on top of the statement. Even a revised text, introduced after a consultation, would arrive with the injunction already in place.

Everywhere else, the question of whether to close a business account has lost its deadline. A newsroom that planned to decide before 20 November now has no date to decide against. It can keep the page and wait, and accept the licence whenever the terms arrive. It can close the account and lose the distribution, which is what the Norwegian local paper Fjell-Ljom said it would do from 1 January. 1 Or it can put the question to the regulator in its own country.

The Swedish publishers have taken the third route. On 28 October, Tidningsutgivarna welcomed the Oslo decision and said that it, together with the Swedish Union of Journalists, had raised Meta's terms with the Swedish Competition Authority and with the government. 9 The two organisations asked for a swift clarification of whether the terms comply with Swedish competition law and with EU competition law. 9 In Denmark, Danske Medier and DPCMO, the collective management body for Danish press publications, have written to the Danish Competition and Consumer Authority about the same terms. 1

Anders Eriksson, who chairs Tidningsutgivarna and runs Bonnier News, told Expressen that nothing rules out a Swedish court process. The route in Sweden runs through the Competition Authority first. "We look at those possibilities and work on them," he said. 10

Two United States senators have written to Mark Zuckerberg. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, called the choice Meta offers publishers "a gross abuse of Meta's power" and asked for an answer, and specific guarantees on paywalls and robots.txt, by 2 November. 1 Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, said in a statement to Nieman Lab that a "vague promise to consult with industry stakeholders and potentially delay implementation is not nearly enough". 8

The European Publishers Council put the same demand in contractual terms. Angela Mills Wade, its executive director, said the consultation "must lead to binding contractual safeguards", and that using Meta's services to reach an audience should carry no wider right to exploit a publisher's journalism. 8

At the European Commission's briefing on 28 October, spokesperson Thomas Regnier said the Commission had received the great majority of replies to its requests for information to AI companies, including every reply whose deadline had passed. 1112 Some deadlines were extended, and the material is under assessment. 11

The exercise covers more than thirty companies and two subjects: the safety and security of AI models, and copyright. 11 Regnier declined to say which companies had been given more time, or why. 11

The copyright part of that exercise turns on two duties in Article 53 of the AI Act, both already in force. A provider of a general-purpose model must put in place a policy to comply with EU copyright law, and in particular to identify and comply with a reservation of rights made under Article 4(3) of the 2019 digital single market directive. 13 The provider must also draw up and make publicly available a sufficiently detailed summary of the content used for training, following a template from the AI Office. 13

Two details decide how much of that reaches the models a newsroom worries about. The exemption for models released under a free and open-source licence covers only the technical documentation duties in Article 53(1)(a) and (b). 13 It leaves the copyright policy and the public training summary in place, and it falls away entirely for models with systemic risk. 13 Models placed on the market before 2 August 2025 have until 2 August 2027 to comply. 11

The summary is the one document a newsroom can read on its own initiative. It comes from a company the newsroom has no contract with, and the law makes it public. It speaks to the question the terms of service leave blank: whether your archive was in a training set.

What the Commission has not done is decide anything. Regnier announced no compliance finding, no penalty and no date for finishing the assessment. 11 A reply to a request for information is a step in verification. 11 The Commission's power to ask comes from Article 91, which lets the AI Office request documentation and information, and allows a structured dialogue with the provider first. 14

Meta's revised commercial terms carry no governing date now. The company withdrew the date it had set and set none in its place, while the page that carries the text still says 20 November. 47

The nearest date belongs to a senator. Schiff's letter asks for an answer by 2 November. 1

The day after, the European Commission's consultation on technology and copyright closes. 15

The first round of payments in the Bartz v. Anthropic settlement is due on 15 November 16, and Australia's joint select committee reports on 30 November. 17

The 2 December date holds: the AI Act's prohibitions on systems that generate non-consensual intimate material and child sexual abuse material, and the Article 50(2) marking duty for systems already on the market. 18 Pennsylvania's disclosure duty for AI-altered advertising lands on 21 December. 19

Four matters carry no date at all. Meta has set none for the end of its consultation or for the arrival of the terms, and its page still advertises the date its spokesperson has walked away from. 47 A Norwegian judge has yet to fix a hearing on Meta's side of the Oslo case, and no final judgment exists to end the injunction. 3 The European Commission has given no timetable for finishing its assessment of the training-data replies. 11 New York's Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act passed both chambers in June and remains with Governor Kathy Hochul, unsigned. 20