A very important update for Rights Holders, Clubs, NGB's and IF's....
Meta’s updated commercial terms, due to take effect on 30 October, could allow it to crawl your websites associated with business accounts and use the content to develop and train its products. Meta says the changes consolidate existing terms and that website owners can still manage crawler access. But legal experts quoted in a recent Nieman Lab article warn that the wording may be broader than many organisations realise, with important questions still unresolved.
Here are the ways it could affect you:
Sports clubs — news, interviews, match reports, historical archives, player profiles, ticketing information, fan content and commercial inventory. Could this material help train AI systems that subsequently answer fans’ questions, shape their choices or compete for the club’s direct relationship with its audience?
National Governing Bodies and International Federations — competition rules, technical regulations, event information, rankings, results, athlete biographies and years of specialist knowledge. These organisations create and maintain valuable information ecosystems. Who should be able to use that knowledge, for what purpose, and on what terms?
Athletes — personal stories, interviews, training insights, images, biographies and content built around their identity and reputation. As AI-generated answers, summaries and synthetic content become more common, how will athletes retain control over their work, protect their identity and capture the actual value of their own audiences?
Sponsors and commercial partners — sponsorship assets, campaign content, activation results and brand associations. If AI systems can learn from publicly accessible material, how might that change the value of exclusive rights, the discoverability of sponsors and the way sponsorship effectiveness is measured?
These are just some of the changes coming to the sports industry over the coming months.
Get in touch (Sanjit@Halfspace.co.uk) if you need to discuss how to build your own data moat and drive the correct value for your organisation.