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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: 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.