Top publishers sue Audible for copyright infringement

https://apnews.com/e2078e81c5ca42a9bcde6aeea678b129

by Vaslo • 7 years ago

17 8 7 years ago

I don’t understand why publishers are against Audible Captions. That feature makes audiobooks less pirate-able, and it also won’t lead to more pirating of ebooks, since it’s better to share a cracked ePub rather than ill-formatted captions. The only revenue loss I can see is from customers who would otherwise buy both the Kindle and the Audible version, but that must be a small fraction.

socalnate1• 7 years ago

My guess is that they just want to be paid more for them.

(i.e. They sold the rights to sell the audiobook alone; if audible wants to also include a text version of the book, they want more money).

Jemm• 7 years ago

At the expense of accessibility.

blueboo• 7 years ago

They're not against it. They're against licensing it for free, and what permitting media-shifting surprises might do to damage all their licensing agreements.

metalliqaz• 7 years ago

Once again big media companies are just making up new rights for themselves. The idea that the properly licensed spoken word version of a published work does not intrinsically include the text is laughable. What's next? Kindle books are infringing on copyright because they reformat the text of the book into a version that fits the user's screen size and preferred font? I mean why not?

And I suppose YouTube is infringing on copyrighted videos when it adds machine-translated CCs, right?

Modern copyright is indistinguishable from rent-seeking.

wfdctrl• 7 years ago

Well, technically it's a derivative work, they have every right to sue.

votepaunchy• 7 years ago

If the translation is performed on device then Audible would not be liable, considering non-infringing use (see: VCR).

Top publishers sue Audible for copyright infringement

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