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from the when-is-text-not-text?-when-it's-a-caption dept.
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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: 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