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I like such features, but I can also see how, in the current legislation, the transcriptions are basically derivative works. Distributing them to the user witho

I like such features, but I can also see how, in the current legislation, the transcriptions are basically derivative works. Distributing them to the user without a license could very well be a copyright infringement. I don't think Fair Use has a chance either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#3._Amount_and_substantiality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#3._Amount_and_substan... > In general, the less that is used in relation to the whole, the more likely the use will be considered fair. If a whole book is transcribed, it's certainly not Fair use anymore.

prepend 7y ago
If I buy an audible book and transcribe it for personal use, that should be fair use. Running machine learning on my audiobook seems like just a way I’m consuming the book I purchased. But I also think it was wrong that the text to speech feature was blocked that basically stopped the reverse working on purchased text books.
- danso 7y ago
  Just to clarify, the "fair" in "fair use" is not really in the sense of whether the use is fair and just. e.g. it's not legally valid to argue "I paid for this audiobook, and I did all the work to transcribe it, and I'm not profiting from it. It's fair use, i.e. not unfair to anyone else" Fair use is primarily about transformative work, e.g. how much copyrighted material is it "fair" for someone to copy and reuse in order to create a transformative work (e.g. parody or critique), without having to compensate the copyright owner. Your example involves reproducing the entirety of an intellectual work onto a different medium. That's not a transformative work in the context of fair use. And IANAL, but as long as the copyright owner is making money from selling separate text and audio copies, I don't see how creating your own print copy via transcription, ostensibly because you didn't want to buy it from the publisher, is technically legal if for some reason it became a legal case. Of course, when it comes to the real world, your personal transcription is protected by the fact that no one knows or cares about it :)
  - prepend 7y ago
    I disagree a bit with your definition of fair use. Fair use is a bit a hodgepodge, I think IANAL, but the “four factors [0] #4 is the use’s limitation on creating value from the original work. It seems to me that creating captions from an audiobook in no way limits the copyright holder from selling more audiobooks. There’s also a factor on profit/non-profit uses that doesn’t hold up with amazon providing it, but could if it’s not a sold feature or is provided through an OSS plugin. The other factors are amount and nature. Since it’s the whole work that seems to go against fair use and the nature doesn’t seem to apply. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
    - danso 7y ago
      I didn't mean to imply my comment gave good coverage of the topic, just wanted to point out that "fair use" is focused on finding a balance between respecting copyright while protecting the freedom to make transformative works. It was definitely a nitpick comment on my part, with little real-world relevance to the original comment because it's inconceivable his personal-transcript would be legally challenged. And because it's so much work to manually-transcribe, to the point where he's likely to make mistakes and deliberate alterations and additions of his own, it'd be even more work to argue that it wasn't transformative, nevermind that it had any profit impact whatsoever.
lloyddobbler 7y ago
Agreed, on the surface (and given current legislation/IP legal climate). One thing that may also come into play - what about accessibility and the Americans with Disabilities Act? In this age of "slippery slopes be damned," I wouldn't necessarily be surprised to see someone file suit alleging that these sort of licenses - that limit scope only to audio - as a whole are infringing upon their rights under the ADA. (Whether it would stand up or not is another question - anyone can file suit for anything, but there's no guarantee of a win. But it seems to me that Amazon might have a good defense here, just based on that idea.)
- scarface74 7y ago
  If you couldn’t hear, why would you buy an audiobook when there is a text version available? That’s like suing a store because you can’t walk up the stairs when they have a ramp available.
  - lloyddobbler 7y ago
    The same reason someone who is deaf would buy a VHS tape (back in the day), when they could just see the film in the theater. I'm not saying it makes sense - you and I agree on that front. But as I mentioned, this is the world we live in, and people have sued for (and won) huge amounts due to odder things.
  - DanBC 7y ago
    > why would you buy an audiobook when there is a text version available? Someone gives it to you. You build up a large collection and then go deaf.
  - gibspaulding 7y ago
    The disability doesn't have to be impaired hearing. Maybe you suffer from a reading disability and find the feature useful for practicing reading, or for some reason have trouble focusing on text or audio on its own, but can improve your comprehension by having both simultaneously.
    - 7y ago
deogeo 7y ago
And if the transcription is done by the user? What if the user gets the print version, and decides to change the font, or background color, or screen brightness. What if they decide to change the volume of the audio version, or use an equalizer to change pitch, or change the reading speed - is that not also a derivative work? What if the user takes notes, associating them to time-stamps (audio) or written directly into the pages (print)? In all those cases the user has altered the work, and made a derivative one, if you will. But the publishers want control over how you consume their works - they want control over what happens on your own device, so they can extract more money from you. It's hard to express how abhorrent I find this.
- perlgeek 7y ago
  > And if the transcription is done by the user? If you can successfully argue that in court, chances are you'll win. > In all those cases the user has altered the work, and made a derivative one, if you will. It's a difference if you do it for your personal notes, or if you then distribute them at scale and make money from it. Just for the record I don't like how it's currently handled, it's just my best understanding of what the law and the courts say.
  - deogeo 7y ago
    > It's a difference if you do it for your personal notes, or if you then distribute them at scale and make money from it. I think that's my main argument - this text-to-speech is the same as doing it for personal notes, and that if this is made illegal, then a huge number of other traditionally allowed activities become illegal. That it happens on someone else's server is irrelevant: 1) It's the same as hiring someone to take notes on a book you own. 2) There's precedent where someone making a recording on your behalf is legally the same as you doing it yourself. 3) If all else fails, the transcription can be done locally.
    - SolaceQuantum 7y ago
      "I think that's my main argument - this text-to-speech is the same as doing it for personal notes," I don't know if this is actually true? Because this isn't suing individual audiobook holders, it's suing the company that is choosing to sell copyrighted-text-in-speech-to-text as a service.

prepend 7y ago

If I buy an audible book and transcribe it for personal use, that should be fair use. Running machine learning on my audiobook seems like just a way I’m consuming the book I purchased. But I also think it was wrong that the text to speech feature was blocked that basically stopped the reverse working on purchased text books.

danso 7y ago
Just to clarify, the "fair" in "fair use" is not really in the sense of whether the use is fair and just. e.g. it's not legally valid to argue "I paid for this audiobook, and I did all the work to transcribe it, and I'm not profiting from it. It's fair use, i.e. not unfair to anyone else" Fair use is primarily about transformative work, e.g. how much copyrighted material is it "fair" for someone to copy and reuse in order to create a transformative work (e.g. parody or critique), without having to compensate the copyright owner. Your example involves reproducing the entirety of an intellectual work onto a different medium. That's not a transformative work in the context of fair use. And IANAL, but as long as the copyright owner is making money from selling separate text and audio copies, I don't see how creating your own print copy via transcription, ostensibly because you didn't want to buy it from the publisher, is technically legal if for some reason it became a legal case. Of course, when it comes to the real world, your personal transcription is protected by the fact that no one knows or cares about it :)
- prepend 7y ago
  I disagree a bit with your definition of fair use. Fair use is a bit a hodgepodge, I think IANAL, but the “four factors [0] #4 is the use’s limitation on creating value from the original work. It seems to me that creating captions from an audiobook in no way limits the copyright holder from selling more audiobooks. There’s also a factor on profit/non-profit uses that doesn’t hold up with amazon providing it, but could if it’s not a sold feature or is provided through an OSS plugin. The other factors are amount and nature. Since it’s the whole work that seems to go against fair use and the nature doesn’t seem to apply. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
  - danso 7y ago
    I didn't mean to imply my comment gave good coverage of the topic, just wanted to point out that "fair use" is focused on finding a balance between respecting copyright while protecting the freedom to make transformative works. It was definitely a nitpick comment on my part, with little real-world relevance to the original comment because it's inconceivable his personal-transcript would be legally challenged. And because it's so much work to manually-transcribe, to the point where he's likely to make mistakes and deliberate alterations and additions of his own, it'd be even more work to argue that it wasn't transformative, nevermind that it had any profit impact whatsoever.

lloyddobbler 7y ago

Agreed, on the surface (and given current legislation/IP legal climate). One thing that may also come into play - what about accessibility and the Americans with Disabilities Act? In this age of "slippery slopes be damned," I wouldn't necessarily be surprised to see someone file suit alleging that these sort of licenses - that limit scope only to audio - as a whole are infringing upon their rights under the ADA. (Whether it would stand up or not is another question - anyone can file suit for anything, but there's no guarantee of a win. But it seems to me that Amazon might have a good defense here, just based on that idea.)

scarface74 7y ago
If you couldn’t hear, why would you buy an audiobook when there is a text version available? That’s like suing a store because you can’t walk up the stairs when they have a ramp available.
- lloyddobbler 7y ago
  The same reason someone who is deaf would buy a VHS tape (back in the day), when they could just see the film in the theater. I'm not saying it makes sense - you and I agree on that front. But as I mentioned, this is the world we live in, and people have sued for (and won) huge amounts due to odder things.
- DanBC 7y ago
  > why would you buy an audiobook when there is a text version available? Someone gives it to you. You build up a large collection and then go deaf.
- gibspaulding 7y ago
  The disability doesn't have to be impaired hearing. Maybe you suffer from a reading disability and find the feature useful for practicing reading, or for some reason have trouble focusing on text or audio on its own, but can improve your comprehension by having both simultaneously.
  - 7y ago

deogeo 7y ago

And if the transcription is done by the user? What if the user gets the print version, and decides to change the font, or background color, or screen brightness. What if they decide to change the volume of the audio version, or use an equalizer to change pitch, or change the reading speed - is that not also a derivative work? What if the user takes notes, associating them to time-stamps (audio) or written directly into the pages (print)? In all those cases the user has altered the work, and made a derivative one, if you will. But the publishers want control over how you consume their works - they want control over what happens on your own device, so they can extract more money from you. It's hard to express how abhorrent I find this.

perlgeek 7y ago
> And if the transcription is done by the user? If you can successfully argue that in court, chances are you'll win. > In all those cases the user has altered the work, and made a derivative one, if you will. It's a difference if you do it for your personal notes, or if you then distribute them at scale and make money from it. Just for the record I don't like how it's currently handled, it's just my best understanding of what the law and the courts say.
- deogeo 7y ago
  > It's a difference if you do it for your personal notes, or if you then distribute them at scale and make money from it. I think that's my main argument - this text-to-speech is the same as doing it for personal notes, and that if this is made illegal, then a huge number of other traditionally allowed activities become illegal. That it happens on someone else's server is irrelevant: 1) It's the same as hiring someone to take notes on a book you own. 2) There's precedent where someone making a recording on your behalf is legally the same as you doing it yourself. 3) If all else fails, the transcription can be done locally.
  - SolaceQuantum 7y ago
    "I think that's my main argument - this text-to-speech is the same as doing it for personal notes," I don't know if this is actually true? Because this isn't suing individual audiobook holders, it's suing the company that is choosing to sell copyrighted-text-in-speech-to-text as a service.