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posted by Fnord666 on Friday August 30 2019, @07:37AM   Printer-friendly
from the when-is-text-not-text?-when-it's-a-caption dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4408

Book publishers sue Audible to stop new speech-to-text feature

Seven of the nation's top book publishers sued Amazon subsidiary Audible on Friday, asking federal courts to block the company from releasing a new feature called Audible Captions that's due out next month. The technology does exactly what it sounds like: display text captions on the screen of your phone or tablet as the corresponding words are read in the audio file.

The publishers argue that this is straight-up copyright infringement. In their view, the law gives them the right to control the distribution of their books in different formats. Audio is a different format from text, they reason, so Audible needs a separate license.

This would be a slam-dunk argument if Audible were generating PDFs of entire books and distributing them to customers alongside the audio files. But what Audible is actually doing is subtly different—in a way that could provide the company with firm legal ground to stand on.

The caption feature "is not and was never intended to be a book," Audible explained in an online statement following the lawsuit. "Listeners cannot read at their own pace or flip through pages as they could with a print book or eBook." Instead, the purpose is to allow "listeners to follow along with a few lines of machine-generated text as they listen to the audio performance."

"We disagree with the claims that this violates any rights and look forward to working with publishers and members of the professional creative community to help them better understand the educational and accessibility benefits of this innovation," Audible added.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by KritonK on Friday August 30 2019, @08:14AM

    by KritonK (465) on Friday August 30 2019, @08:14AM (#887681)

    Given that the article talks about an "audio performance", and not someone droning on and on and on, simply reading the text, I would think that adding captions would let people, who have partial hearing or are not fluent in a language, and thus cannot grasp 100% of the spoken text, enjoy said performance. Thus, Audible is doing the publishers a favor, by broadening the audio books' potential audience. It is therefore the publishers, who should be paying Audible, for providing them with a useful service, not the other way round!

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