« At the heart of the case will be a determination on the transformative nature of an AI-created audio transcription, and whether that constitutes a violation o

« At the heart of the case will be a determination on the transformative nature of an AI-created audio transcription, and whether that constitutes a violation of the copyrights held on a written work. » It seems to me that this shouldn't be what matters. Clearly Audible are distributing the books in a way protected by copyright, so they're relying on the permission they've paid the publishers for. If the publishers have been giving out different licences for "audiobook" rights and "ebook" rights, that's not a distinction from copyright law, so deciding what's allowed should be a matter of interpreting the licence, not arguing about whether what they're doing is "transformative". After all, the publishers could presumably write a licence that says Audible aren't allowed to distribute recordings of the work with background music added, and if a case about that went to court it shouldn't matter that the background music isn't itself any kind of copyright violation.