[tubemonkey]

Major book publishers sue Amazon’s Audible over new speech-to-text feature

Dear Publishers:

Get a life!

Some of the world’s largest book publishers have jointly filed a lawsuit against Amazon-owned audiobook company Audible today over a new, controversial speech-to-text feature the literary industry claims is a violation of copyright law.

The lawsuit, filed in the Southern District Court of New York, includes the Big Five: Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster. It also includes San Francisco-based publisher Chronicle Books and Scholastic, the major children’s publisher that owns publishing rights to Harry Potter and The Hunger Games. All seven plaintiffs are members of the Association of American Publishers.

Publishers are taking issue with Audible’s new Captions feature, introduced last month. The feature uses machine learning to transcribe spoken words into written ones, so users can read along while they listen to an audiobook. The issue, however, is that Audible is doing this based on audiobook recordings, which have separate licenses to physical books and ebooks. The company is not apparently obtaining the necessary licenses to reproduce the written versions of these works.

Because Audible is relying on artificial intelligence, it appears the company is trying to claim a distinction between a newly created piece of text composed using AI, based on an audio recording, and the virtually identical text version of the book the audiobook was created from. At the time of its launch, Audible CEO Don Katz positioned Captions as an educational feature designed for schools, telling USA Today, “We know from years and years of work, that parents and educators, in particular, understand that an audio experience of well-composed words is really important in developing learners.”