Audible files their response (via Ars Technica):
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...-are-fair-use/
Sure enough, they're relying on the Betamax line of precedents:
Quote:
"Audible Captions is not a book of any kind, much less a replacement for paper books, e-books, or cross-forma products," Audible argues in its latest filing.
Audible argues that the technology has substantial public benefits. It can help people with learning disabilities or limited hearing to better understand audiobooks. It can aid people learning a new language. And it can help a growing number of teens who have grown accustomed to watching online videos with captions on—and would benefit from listening to audiobooks the same way.
Audible argues its technology is fair use
Copyright's fair-use doctrine has enabled a number of key media technologies over the last 40 years. Amazon's legal filing cites the famous 1984 Supreme Court ruling holding that recording copyrighted TV shows with a video cassette recorder was legal. The company points to a 2015 appeals court ruling upholding Google's ambitious project to scan millions of copyrighted books for use in its search engine. Audible also mentions a series of cases holding that it was fair use to display thumbnails of copyrighted images in search results.
In each of those cases, the courts sided with the defendants even though they had copied works without the permission of their copyright holders. Fair use considers several factors, including whether the use is "transformative" and whether it will undermine the market for the original work.
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Quote:
Audible says its software sends the audio file to Amazon's servers for transcription, then stores the full transcript on the user's device. However, Audible takes precautions to make sure the user can only view a few words of the transcript at a time—and only synchronized to the audiobook. These limitations bolster Audible's fair-use case because the transcript is a poor substitute for an e-book if it can only be viewed at the speed the audio file plays.
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Going from audio to text is definitely transformative so the question (legally) boils down to whether captions on an audio file will replace enough ebook sales to be considered as undermining. Given audiobooks are more expensive than ebooks that is going to be a tough row to hoe for publishers. Courts have not been terribly receptive to anti-fair use arguments in even more complex cases, like the MP3 case.
They'd better have good lawyers.