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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.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Friday August 30 2019, @10:09AM (4 children)
Who do I hate more, the book publishers who gatekeep and ruin the publishing industry OR amazon which turns the publishing industry into a state integrated mind-reading festival so that a rich clown can build spaceships while making warehouse workers cry and hold in their pee on command?
I say cage match, to the death, all parties involved, no holds barred, all weapons allowed, and make them fight it out over this travesty of an audible feature.
If, however, one of the publishers were smart, they would discover my writing here and realize that I am their best hope against amazon due to the immense force of my withering criticism, then if they were to publish my work, I might help them with their little problem.
So I guess, gasp, I would side with the publishers who slushpile my work for eternity over amazon which would take a percent of my attempt to sell my work from a platform that clearly indicates I am in the slush pile.
Cultural hegemony is a thing, look it up. If they are all on the same side against you and represent a completely outdated and tyrannical way of looking at the world, you don't have to take sides, you can hate them both.
And what if I told you that a static web page was better than a book? And that me writing on my static site added value to the world inherently, which our system treats as an externality and ignores. In order to get around this dilemma without inventing a real solution, we have a thing like all of the companies involved in this AI dilemma that I am ridiculing because it's ridiculous. The actual people doing the work, writers like me, have no place or voice in this system whatsoever and we are trained not even to notice this. The copyright system is the same, the people who didn't do the work form a legal entity to harass all potential future consumers of the work to compensate them for horsetrading the work of dead people.
The amazon is burning, victoria's secret is still a functioning business, disposable plastic packaging is still considered the best of all possible worlds, the world is at war, and I bet a hundred lawyers and their horses are working on this problem, plus the development team who think this dumb feature has any value whatsoever.
thesesystemsarefailing.net
(Score: 5, Informative) by Freeman on Friday August 30 2019, @03:00PM (1 child)
While Amazon is definitely destroying brick and mortar book stores. There's no reason why writers couldn't band together to create better systems or at least influence Amazon's dealings with them.
The reality is that most people don't care and the few that do care can still roll their own or jump on a different ship.
https://www.baen.com/ [baen.com]
Also: https://www.smashwords.com/ [smashwords.com]
Don't forget, the following great sources for public domain titles: (Instead of buying them from Amazon.)
https://librivox.org/ [librivox.org]
http://www.gutenberg.org/ [gutenberg.org]
Then there's the Internet Archive: (Text, Audio, Video, Software, and Website Archive)
https://archive.org/ [archive.org]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Saturday August 31 2019, @08:42AM
Amazon is destroying a lot more than book stores, but thanks for this! +1 informative
For people like myself writing new plays, new screenplays and non-fiction about resisting totalitarianism, freedcom etc, it is a dark age though.
The 'publishing' and 'marketing' industries are locked down. People on the right say it's the 'blue church', people on the left and others say it is about 'supporting the troops', but zionism clearly plays a role. Either you never criticize israel, ever, or you never work in this publishing, comedy, acting, music, journalism ever again. But it is a secretive blackballing, which is the work of todays phrase of the month, 'cultural hegemony.' There is a system at work and the thin slice of human thought allowed in your average barnes and noble is indicative of the decline of american society, maybe english speaking culture globally.
This other guy told me, 'If they don't like you, they'll just steal all your stuff.' And he wasn't a conspiracy type, but you've seen his face on national beer commercials so he made it a lot higher up in hollywood than I did. Who he thinks 'they' is, I'll always have to wonder. Wish I could ask him, but I also could not stand him.
"You're a nobody, a never-was. You'll never work in this town again." - party down quote
(Score: 5, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Friday August 30 2019, @04:02PM (1 child)
I too would like to see the copyright system replaced. It's done a lot of damage. It pushes our buttons in the worst ways, making us fear the loss of hypothetical, unproven profits. There are a number of promising replacements, but they need testing, refinement, and polishing.
You want things to change, and fast? Show that publishers and organizations such as ASCAP are evil scum who steal from the public, traitorously undermine our democracy by denying education to children, and commit murder by withholding vital medical knowledge from the sick and their doctors, thereby causing needless deaths. If we could document and make widely known a few cases of those sorts where cruel and needless harm could be laid squarely at the feet of this hoarding of knowledge, it would do a great deal to weaken the grip copyright still has on the public imagination. The MAFIAA did much to turn the public against copyright with their overzealous terror campaign in which they hysterically accused everyone in the entire world of piracy and tried to make examples of a few ordinary citizens who were selected more because they looked weak rather than particularly guilty. They wanted to skip the niceties of the legal process, really didn't see a need to test whether the accused were indeed guilty. They just knew guilt was obvious, because everyone is guilty. "Making available" was the standard they managed to establish, no need to show that anyone had actuaully downloaded what was available.
Almost everyone really is guilty, not because we're hopelessly corrupt, but because the laws are far too extreme. Create an mp3, and you are a thief. If your neighbors open a window and play their music collection loud enough for you to overhear, both them and you are in violation. Doesn't matter if you hate your neighbors' taste in music. I have never heard of anyone actually being prosecuted for overhearing a bit of music, but as I understand it, it's still against the law.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Saturday August 31 2019, @08:51AM
I see things very similarly. You might like some of the things I write about at my homepage.
For you to hear an mp3, the file gets copied not just once, but maybe a dozen times from various components. Computers are copying machines, this changes everything. Copying used to be the *most difficult* part of the writing industry.
And copying digitally is replicating, it's as if I took your physical book and used star trek to make a whole new one, that didn't diminish the first at all. The case that this is 'theft' is bananas, nothing was stolen, something in fact wondrous and magical happened. And the people who should be most overjoyed are the ones running around trying to set up barbed wire and minefields in the computer itself to break the breakthrough itself.
Seems us writers should use this to our advantage, and I am, but for some reason all of the places where independent writers can just write to get attention, are being taken over by governments and militaries so that they can create fake avatars, make them popular, and then use them as new avenues of propaganda.
So that is even more twisted, it's not just that the publishing industry won't let me in, and that my highly rated writing here and other places means nothing towards me earning money as a skilled writer, it is that *even if* I do get some audience, they will notice it and copy my strategies, replicate what I am saying, and use it to steal all of my popularity.
And this will all be done as part of national "defense" that I am paying for, that is supposed to protect me.
The stituation is bad, I am ashamed of my country and all of the people going to do their actual day jobs to do this thinking it is somehow patriotic or about freedom, when they are building a pernicious, mendacious system of mechanized, weaponized, lies.