7 ms·

Your question is a reasonable one, but you're misunderstanding the bigger picture. The bigger picture is that you are offered something specific for a specified

by SiVal 7y ago

Your question is a reasonable one, but you're misunderstanding the bigger picture. The bigger picture is that you are offered something specific for a specified price. You can accept the deal, reject it, or make a counter offer. What you can't do is declare that your payment means that you actually bought the rights to the text of the book or anything else you unilaterally and post facto include in the purchase for philosophical reasons, when those things weren't included in the offer that you accepted. What was offered, and you accepted, was a license to unlimited personal listening to an audio performance. If you want something else, make an offer or wait for them to make one. It's not quite as simple as this because governments often want to get into the deal and declare that certain offers aren't what the offerer offers but what the lawmakers think he should have offered, but absent this intercession, you were offered an audio performance for a certain price, and if you accepted, that's what you got.

krisoft 7y ago
Great. I accepted the audio performance and that's what i got. Can i run the audio performance through a speech to text engine?
- ysavir 7y ago
  Not a lawyer, but I imagine that you, as an end user, can do that, so long as you are not selling that text or distributing that text. But Amazon, who is licensed to provide you with an audio book but not a text book, cannot offer you a speech-to-text rendition of that audio book as part of your audiobook purchase. Nor do I imagine them being able to offer you the technology to do it on your own as a "feature", as that would be a rather hideous loophole.
  - wbhart 7y ago
    I imagine that Amazon are going to argue in court that if the publishers are held to be correct, then computer monitor manufacturers are not licensed to display copies of the work and that they also should pay the publisher (again) as should people who make software that alters the performance, e.g. volume or equalizer functions. Amazon is not fundamentally offering a textual copy of the work. If they were doing so they would be violating the license. Instead they are offering a technology to transform the (possibly flawed performance of) the work using a tool (that is itself possibly flawed). That is not the same thing as distributing a textual copy of the original work. A computer is a device on which the work is licensed to be distributed, and it happens to have the capability to transform the work, just as a volume knob or a graphic equalizer would. If Amazon can't offer this technology because they are licensed to distribute the work, what is to stop someone selling such technology who is not licensed to distribute the work? The effect is the same, precisely because it is a general purpose computing device with sophisticated functionality. And yet I don't see publishers getting far with a claim that all manufacturers of speech-to-text devices (think of deaf people) should pay them because the device could be used to transform their works. Of course I know this is not how any publisher sees their work. E.g. you need a different license to perform a work than you need to modify or make a video production of a work (mechanical vs sync license, etc.)
    - ysavir 7y ago
      > A computer is a device on which the work is licensed to be distributed, and it happens to have the capability to transform the work, just as a volume knob or a graphic equalizer would. That's not a fair comparison, and I'm sure you know that. But I appreciate someone playing the devil's advocate here; such exercises are always useful. > If Amazon can't offer this technology because they are licensed to distribute the work, what is to stop someone selling such technology who is not licensed to distribute the work? What's stopping them from selling such technology? Nothing, as far as I'm aware. It's similar to how BitTorrent clients are not themselves illegal, but users of the client can use them towards illegal ends.
    - gnicholas 7y ago
      > I imagine that Amazon are going to argue in court that if the publishers are held to be correct, then computer monitor manufacturers are not licensed to display copies of the work and that they also should pay the publisher (again) as should people who make software that alters the performance, e.g. volume or equalizer functions. The well-established doctrine of patent/trademark/copyright exhaustion [1] prevents this undesirable result. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_doctrine_under_U.S._law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_doctrine_under_U.S....
      - gamblor956 7y ago
        To clarify, the exhaustion doctrine allows the owner of the licensed work (ebook, etc) to access/display/use the work except as disallowed by the license. This includes viewing it on a computer monitor. It's irrelevant that the computer monitor maker does not have a license to the work, since the viewer does. In the case of the audiobook speech-to-text argument: the licensee has a license to the audiobook but not the prose version of the work, which is a legally distinct creation under many decades of international and domestic IP law. So Amazon or the customer needs to have the license to the prose work for speech-to-text to be defensible, but neither do.
        wbhart 7y ago
        I am not convinced by this. Amazon does not at any point convey a copy of the written work to the customer. At no point does such a copy exist, nor can it conceivably be constructed from the technology Amazon are supplying to their customers. This is not (if I understand correctly) a PDF document they can download and read, it's a technology that allows the words that are currently being spoken to be seen in written text. At no time does a legally significant quantity of the written work get conveyed to the customer. Amazon will just ask the publishers to show where this alleged copy of the textual work resides in their system. They won't be able to do so, as it doesn't exist there. This does seem to be what they are in fact arguing. And I think they will prevail. I would not expect them to prevail if they offered a pdf of the book or if their software actually contained a copy of the original text that was being conveyed to the customer.
  - 693471 7y ago
    Amazon probably cannot provide you the pre-transcribed text (like subtitles i guess) but I bet they could provide an Alexa-transcribed just like Apple could provide a Siri-transcribed version. Closed captioning is permitted, so why not? :)
- ghaff 7y ago
  For your personal use? Yes as a practical matter. Probably as a legal one. The publisher/rights holder/distributor of the audio performance has no obligation to provide you with the means to do the conversion though and, to this case, if they don't own the rights probably can't do so as a bonus for the initial purchase.
  - derefr 7y ago
    The distributor can’t distribute it as part of the offering, sure; but I don’t see why they can’t offer it as a freestanding software utility that happens to be easily accessible from their distribution platform. It’s not a “bonus for the initial purchase” in that case; it’s just something they coincidentally happen to offer, that you might happen to already have installed, or install later.
    - dagw 7y ago
      I don’t see why they can’t offer it as a freestanding software utility that happens to be easily accessible from their distribution platform. Really the only actual answer to that question is because a lawyer convinced a judge to say that they can't. If they can get a better lawyer and/or a different judge then maybe all of sudden they can.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      As a legal matter, maybe. You can start to get onto shaky ground when you provide something that's explicitly marketed for some infringing purpose. I'm not sure how useful any of this is anyway though. I took another look at Amazon Transcribe a couple weeks ago and reached the conclusion that its transcriptions are still pretty bad compared to a human doing it. You get the general gist so long as it's a clean recording but there are lots of errors. Standalone software is going to be even worse. Imperfect captioning is better than nothing in some cases. But who wants to read a book--much less use it as a learning tool--when there are errors every other sentence? ADDED: It really doesn't seem like much of a threat to publishers in its current form. Probably lots of errors and the text is only delivered a few lines at a time as the book is read aloud. However, I can see publishers looking down the road and imagining much improved ML transcription and larger blocks of text as something that's legally indistinguishable.
- adventured 7y ago
  > Can i run the audio performance through a speech to text engine? I strongly suspect that would hold up in court in the US. For the same reason that I can alter the book and story in my own personal context of ownership. I can take the story, the book, and rewrite it for personal consumption, while keeping all of the original content in my new version. What I can't do typically of course is sell that version, distribute it commercially. I could use a note taking system that pulls pieces from a physical book as I read it, or snap photos of pages I find interesting. Or I could do that manually with the audio version and take notes of the audio book as it progresses. Both approaches - and numerous others like them - would be protected so long as you're not trying to make money from what you're doing.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    >not trying to make money Generally agree with what you wrote. Money isn't the central question though. Something like fanfic distributed for free can still be infringing.
  - gamblor956 7y ago
    Commercial nature of use is only part of the fair use analysis. You could run your own text-so-speech conversion (or vice versa)for your own private use on fair use grounds because it's a textbook case of fair use. It's very different when you're doing it for someone else's use. There are plenty of situations in which even commercial conversion activity would qualify as fair use.
- brians 7y ago
  Let's say yes. Can Amazon invent a better compression scheme that uses phonemes & UTF-8 text as a cue? Say, something that compactly expresses Neil Gaiman's voice, then just shows the text of Anansi Boys?
- mcherm 7y ago
  Not legally. It's kind of like how just because you have a pair of scissors it doesn't mean you are entitled to cut people's hair (without a stylist license). Or how just because you own a scalpel you aren't allowed to practice medicine (without a medical license). The government has determined that these behaviors need to be regulated. Perhaps you agree about regulating the surgery but don't agree about regulating haircuts... that's a matter for the political process. In a similar fashion, Congress has passed laws on copyright that specifically say that if you own a copy of a work you can do anything you want with that copy, but you cannot make a new copy in a different form. This made sense when "a copy" meant a physical book, but that law isn't necessarily worded in a way that makes sense for electronic documents. I am old enough to remember when people tried suing over web servers, because when the browser received the file it made a local "copy" of the document in memory (without a license). The courts eventually settled on an interpretation that roughly said "ephemeral copies made during the process of delivering the work don't count as 'making a copy'". But they also settled on an interpretation that said "changing the medium -- like going between text and audio -- does count as making a copy". So text-to-speech (or speech-to-text) converters are illegal; or, more precisely, using them on any copyrighted work (which is just about every work) is illegal without the permission of the copyright owner. Maybe not the best law for today's modern world, but it's the law we have and entrenched power groups would resist any attempt to change it.
mirimir 7y ago
> You can accept the deal, reject it, or make a counter offer. Or just get it from TPB or whatever.
cortesoft 7y ago
Except that the courts have said many times that a seller doesn't have carte blanche to add whatever restrictions they want to a purchase. The First Sale doctrine, for example, means you can't stop someone from reselling their purchased book. It is tricky for digital items, but depending on the exact details, the First Sale doctrine can sometimes apply. Being able to take the legally purchased text and running it through a computerized reader might end up being legal... we need the courts to decide. It isn't enough that the person selling it doesn't want to allow it.
- gamblor956 7y ago
  First Sale Doctrine applies to specific copies of creative works (i.e., a book or DVD). It doesn't apply to licenses for creative works. When you buy an ebook, you are buying a license to create copies of the creative work as necessary to make use of the license purchased (i.e., a copy in your phone or on your kindle). FSD doesn't let you sell either of those transient copies, and it doesn't apply to the license itself because the license isn't a copy within the meaning of the statute underlying the FSD. In the rare occasion where the license and the copy are one and the same for a digital good, the FSD would apply.
  - cortesoft 7y ago
    My point was just that it isn't as simple to say "the seller put this restriction on the transaction, take it or leave it" There are limits to what they can restrict.
    - gamblor956 7y ago
      There are limits to what they can restrict. Yes, the limitations can't violate criminal or contract law (or other laws in general), and can't completely prevent the licensee from making use of the licensing rights they paid for. Otherwise, any restrictions are fair game. If the putative licensee doesn't want to accept the restrictions in the license, their remedy is to not enter into a licensing agreement in the first place; they have no right to simply ignore the license restrictions.

by SiVal 7y ago

krisoft 7y ago

Great. I accepted the audio performance and that's what i got. Can i run the audio performance through a speech to text engine?

ysavir 7y ago
Not a lawyer, but I imagine that you, as an end user, can do that, so long as you are not selling that text or distributing that text. But Amazon, who is licensed to provide you with an audio book but not a text book, cannot offer you a speech-to-text rendition of that audio book as part of your audiobook purchase. Nor do I imagine them being able to offer you the technology to do it on your own as a "feature", as that would be a rather hideous loophole.
- wbhart 7y ago
  I imagine that Amazon are going to argue in court that if the publishers are held to be correct, then computer monitor manufacturers are not licensed to display copies of the work and that they also should pay the publisher (again) as should people who make software that alters the performance, e.g. volume or equalizer functions. Amazon is not fundamentally offering a textual copy of the work. If they were doing so they would be violating the license. Instead they are offering a technology to transform the (possibly flawed performance of) the work using a tool (that is itself possibly flawed). That is not the same thing as distributing a textual copy of the original work. A computer is a device on which the work is licensed to be distributed, and it happens to have the capability to transform the work, just as a volume knob or a graphic equalizer would. If Amazon can't offer this technology because they are licensed to distribute the work, what is to stop someone selling such technology who is not licensed to distribute the work? The effect is the same, precisely because it is a general purpose computing device with sophisticated functionality. And yet I don't see publishers getting far with a claim that all manufacturers of speech-to-text devices (think of deaf people) should pay them because the device could be used to transform their works. Of course I know this is not how any publisher sees their work. E.g. you need a different license to perform a work than you need to modify or make a video production of a work (mechanical vs sync license, etc.)
  - ysavir 7y ago
    > A computer is a device on which the work is licensed to be distributed, and it happens to have the capability to transform the work, just as a volume knob or a graphic equalizer would. That's not a fair comparison, and I'm sure you know that. But I appreciate someone playing the devil's advocate here; such exercises are always useful. > If Amazon can't offer this technology because they are licensed to distribute the work, what is to stop someone selling such technology who is not licensed to distribute the work? What's stopping them from selling such technology? Nothing, as far as I'm aware. It's similar to how BitTorrent clients are not themselves illegal, but users of the client can use them towards illegal ends.
  - gnicholas 7y ago
    > I imagine that Amazon are going to argue in court that if the publishers are held to be correct, then computer monitor manufacturers are not licensed to display copies of the work and that they also should pay the publisher (again) as should people who make software that alters the performance, e.g. volume or equalizer functions. The well-established doctrine of patent/trademark/copyright exhaustion [1] prevents this undesirable result. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_doctrine_under_U.S._law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_doctrine_under_U.S....
    - gamblor956 7y ago
      To clarify, the exhaustion doctrine allows the owner of the licensed work (ebook, etc) to access/display/use the work except as disallowed by the license. This includes viewing it on a computer monitor. It's irrelevant that the computer monitor maker does not have a license to the work, since the viewer does. In the case of the audiobook speech-to-text argument: the licensee has a license to the audiobook but not the prose version of the work, which is a legally distinct creation under many decades of international and domestic IP law. So Amazon or the customer needs to have the license to the prose work for speech-to-text to be defensible, but neither do.
      - wbhart 7y ago
        I am not convinced by this. Amazon does not at any point convey a copy of the written work to the customer. At no point does such a copy exist, nor can it conceivably be constructed from the technology Amazon are supplying to their customers. This is not (if I understand correctly) a PDF document they can download and read, it's a technology that allows the words that are currently being spoken to be seen in written text. At no time does a legally significant quantity of the written work get conveyed to the customer. Amazon will just ask the publishers to show where this alleged copy of the textual work resides in their system. They won't be able to do so, as it doesn't exist there. This does seem to be what they are in fact arguing. And I think they will prevail. I would not expect them to prevail if they offered a pdf of the book or if their software actually contained a copy of the original text that was being conveyed to the customer.
- 693471 7y ago
  Amazon probably cannot provide you the pre-transcribed text (like subtitles i guess) but I bet they could provide an Alexa-transcribed just like Apple could provide a Siri-transcribed version. Closed captioning is permitted, so why not? :)
ghaff 7y ago
For your personal use? Yes as a practical matter. Probably as a legal one. The publisher/rights holder/distributor of the audio performance has no obligation to provide you with the means to do the conversion though and, to this case, if they don't own the rights probably can't do so as a bonus for the initial purchase.
- derefr 7y ago
  The distributor can’t distribute it as part of the offering, sure; but I don’t see why they can’t offer it as a freestanding software utility that happens to be easily accessible from their distribution platform. It’s not a “bonus for the initial purchase” in that case; it’s just something they coincidentally happen to offer, that you might happen to already have installed, or install later.
  - dagw 7y ago
    I don’t see why they can’t offer it as a freestanding software utility that happens to be easily accessible from their distribution platform. Really the only actual answer to that question is because a lawyer convinced a judge to say that they can't. If they can get a better lawyer and/or a different judge then maybe all of sudden they can.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    As a legal matter, maybe. You can start to get onto shaky ground when you provide something that's explicitly marketed for some infringing purpose. I'm not sure how useful any of this is anyway though. I took another look at Amazon Transcribe a couple weeks ago and reached the conclusion that its transcriptions are still pretty bad compared to a human doing it. You get the general gist so long as it's a clean recording but there are lots of errors. Standalone software is going to be even worse. Imperfect captioning is better than nothing in some cases. But who wants to read a book--much less use it as a learning tool--when there are errors every other sentence? ADDED: It really doesn't seem like much of a threat to publishers in its current form. Probably lots of errors and the text is only delivered a few lines at a time as the book is read aloud. However, I can see publishers looking down the road and imagining much improved ML transcription and larger blocks of text as something that's legally indistinguishable.
adventured 7y ago
> Can i run the audio performance through a speech to text engine? I strongly suspect that would hold up in court in the US. For the same reason that I can alter the book and story in my own personal context of ownership. I can take the story, the book, and rewrite it for personal consumption, while keeping all of the original content in my new version. What I can't do typically of course is sell that version, distribute it commercially. I could use a note taking system that pulls pieces from a physical book as I read it, or snap photos of pages I find interesting. Or I could do that manually with the audio version and take notes of the audio book as it progresses. Both approaches - and numerous others like them - would be protected so long as you're not trying to make money from what you're doing.
- ghaff 7y ago
  >not trying to make money Generally agree with what you wrote. Money isn't the central question though. Something like fanfic distributed for free can still be infringing.
- gamblor956 7y ago
  Commercial nature of use is only part of the fair use analysis. You could run your own text-so-speech conversion (or vice versa)for your own private use on fair use grounds because it's a textbook case of fair use. It's very different when you're doing it for someone else's use. There are plenty of situations in which even commercial conversion activity would qualify as fair use.
brians 7y ago
Let's say yes. Can Amazon invent a better compression scheme that uses phonemes & UTF-8 text as a cue? Say, something that compactly expresses Neil Gaiman's voice, then just shows the text of Anansi Boys?
mcherm 7y ago
Not legally. It's kind of like how just because you have a pair of scissors it doesn't mean you are entitled to cut people's hair (without a stylist license). Or how just because you own a scalpel you aren't allowed to practice medicine (without a medical license). The government has determined that these behaviors need to be regulated. Perhaps you agree about regulating the surgery but don't agree about regulating haircuts... that's a matter for the political process. In a similar fashion, Congress has passed laws on copyright that specifically say that if you own a copy of a work you can do anything you want with that copy, but you cannot make a new copy in a different form. This made sense when "a copy" meant a physical book, but that law isn't necessarily worded in a way that makes sense for electronic documents. I am old enough to remember when people tried suing over web servers, because when the browser received the file it made a local "copy" of the document in memory (without a license). The courts eventually settled on an interpretation that roughly said "ephemeral copies made during the process of delivering the work don't count as 'making a copy'". But they also settled on an interpretation that said "changing the medium -- like going between text and audio -- does count as making a copy". So text-to-speech (or speech-to-text) converters are illegal; or, more precisely, using them on any copyrighted work (which is just about every work) is illegal without the permission of the copyright owner. Maybe not the best law for today's modern world, but it's the law we have and entrenched power groups would resist any attempt to change it.

mirimir 7y ago

> You can accept the deal, reject it, or make a counter offer. Or just get it from TPB or whatever.

cortesoft 7y ago

Except that the courts have said many times that a seller doesn't have carte blanche to add whatever restrictions they want to a purchase. The First Sale doctrine, for example, means you can't stop someone from reselling their purchased book. It is tricky for digital items, but depending on the exact details, the First Sale doctrine can sometimes apply. Being able to take the legally purchased text and running it through a computerized reader might end up being legal... we need the courts to decide. It isn't enough that the person selling it doesn't want to allow it.

gamblor956 7y ago
First Sale Doctrine applies to specific copies of creative works (i.e., a book or DVD). It doesn't apply to licenses for creative works. When you buy an ebook, you are buying a license to create copies of the creative work as necessary to make use of the license purchased (i.e., a copy in your phone or on your kindle). FSD doesn't let you sell either of those transient copies, and it doesn't apply to the license itself because the license isn't a copy within the meaning of the statute underlying the FSD. In the rare occasion where the license and the copy are one and the same for a digital good, the FSD would apply.
- cortesoft 7y ago
  My point was just that it isn't as simple to say "the seller put this restriction on the transaction, take it or leave it" There are limits to what they can restrict.
  - gamblor956 7y ago
    There are limits to what they can restrict. Yes, the limitations can't violate criminal or contract law (or other laws in general), and can't completely prevent the licensee from making use of the licensing rights they paid for. Otherwise, any restrictions are fair game. If the putative licensee doesn't want to accept the restrictions in the license, their remedy is to not enter into a licensing agreement in the first place; they have no right to simply ignore the license restrictions.