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Audio books are performance and story. It’s not just the words. It is a substantially different work of art, even if it is the same story. I think that is where

Audio books are performance and story. It’s not just the words. It is a substantially different work of art, even if it is the same story. I think that is where the GP is too reductionist.

danso 7y ago
I agree that audiobooks require substantial work. But I'm confused about who is "getting paid twice for contributing nothing"? Is it the writer that's getting paid twice "for contributing nothing" to an audio book? That doesn't make sense to me.
derefr 7y ago
Audiobooks add on top of the original book; but I would argue that you could train a human being with a set of deterministic rules that they can use to transform an audio-book into the exact text of the text-book that was published, with 100% fidelity, 100% of the time. Which is to say, an audiobook is a lossless embedding of the original text-book. If you’re buying the audiobook, you’re already buying the text-book; it’s in there! Another way to look at it: if you own a music video, do you have a license for the song that the music video is a music video of? I would argue you do—you have to have that license, to be able to have a license for the MV, just like you have to own licenses to all the tracks on an album, to be able to claim to have a license for listening to the album. And, as such, it really wouldn’t make sense to attempt to sell licenses to consumption of MVs, that don’t implicitly include licenses to consumption of the audio tracks within said MVs. (Has anyone ever argued that people don’t have a right to use youtube-dl to extract the audio track from MVs publicly-posted by their rights-owners? I assume, if they did, this argument went about as well as arguing you can’t record music off the radio...) This is the equivalence being offered here: a text book is to an audiobook as the audio track of a music video is to the MV itself: a component. In the case of a text book, it’s not one that’s literally there in bits; but since it can be extracted with 100% fidelity, the information that component is made up of is clearly there, in the thing you bought. It’s no different than if an audio track was embedded in your video but was reversed or something.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  > you could train a human being with a set of deterministic rules that they can use to transform an audio-book into the exact text of the text-book that was published, with 100% fidelity, 100% of the time Totally disagree. Consider poetry, or poetic elements in literature, where the form of the text conveys meaning. That is lossily conveyed in an audiobook.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    Or photographs/maps/etc. To say nothing of just the overall design and physical instantiation of the book. Back when I listened to audio books while commuting, I learned to be careful when selecting non-fiction history because a lot of things could be hard to follow in the absence of, say, maps in the original printed text.
  - filoleg 7y ago
    But if people create the text version of it by listening to the audiobook, it won’t have all that fancy formatting and extra work that you said goes into the print version. So, in this scenario, the user isn’t getting all that extra value produced by the work of a person doing the fancy formatting. Which makes it sound like they are not infringing on the copyright of that work, as they are not getting it by either using software or transcribing the audiobook by hand.
    - gamblor956 7y ago
      But they are infringing on the copyright of the work. They've created a copy of the work in a different medium, which is one of the textbook examples of copyright infringement (not getting into whether fair use defense applies).
      - filoleg 7y ago
        >But they are infringing on the copyright of the work. They are infringing in the same way as pen and paper companies are infringing when you hand-write the contents of an audiobook on paper for personal consumption. I believe that most people would consider this being an allowable thing to do.

Audio books are performance and story. It’s not just the words. It is a substantially different work of art, even if it is the same story. I think that is where the GP is too reductionist.

danso 7y ago

I agree that audiobooks require substantial work. But I'm confused about who is "getting paid twice for contributing nothing"? Is it the writer that's getting paid twice "for contributing nothing" to an audio book? That doesn't make sense to me.

derefr 7y ago

Audiobooks add on top of the original book; but I would argue that you could train a human being with a set of deterministic rules that they can use to transform an audio-book into the exact text of the text-book that was published, with 100% fidelity, 100% of the time. Which is to say, an audiobook is a lossless embedding of the original text-book. If you’re buying the audiobook, you’re already buying the text-book; it’s in there! Another way to look at it: if you own a music video, do you have a license for the song that the music video is a music video of? I would argue you do—you have to have that license, to be able to have a license for the MV, just like you have to own licenses to all the tracks on an album, to be able to claim to have a license for listening to the album. And, as such, it really wouldn’t make sense to attempt to sell licenses to consumption of MVs, that don’t implicitly include licenses to consumption of the audio tracks within said MVs. (Has anyone ever argued that people don’t have a right to use youtube-dl to extract the audio track from MVs publicly-posted by their rights-owners? I assume, if they did, this argument went about as well as arguing you can’t record music off the radio...) This is the equivalence being offered here: a text book is to an audiobook as the audio track of a music video is to the MV itself: a component. In the case of a text book, it’s not one that’s literally there in bits; but since it can be extracted with 100% fidelity, the information that component is made up of is clearly there, in the thing you bought. It’s no different than if an audio track was embedded in your video but was reversed or something.

JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> you could train a human being with a set of deterministic rules that they can use to transform an audio-book into the exact text of the text-book that was published, with 100% fidelity, 100% of the time Totally disagree. Consider poetry, or poetic elements in literature, where the form of the text conveys meaning. That is lossily conveyed in an audiobook.
- ghaff 7y ago
  Or photographs/maps/etc. To say nothing of just the overall design and physical instantiation of the book. Back when I listened to audio books while commuting, I learned to be careful when selecting non-fiction history because a lot of things could be hard to follow in the absence of, say, maps in the original printed text.
- filoleg 7y ago
  But if people create the text version of it by listening to the audiobook, it won’t have all that fancy formatting and extra work that you said goes into the print version. So, in this scenario, the user isn’t getting all that extra value produced by the work of a person doing the fancy formatting. Which makes it sound like they are not infringing on the copyright of that work, as they are not getting it by either using software or transcribing the audiobook by hand.
  - gamblor956 7y ago
    But they are infringing on the copyright of the work. They've created a copy of the work in a different medium, which is one of the textbook examples of copyright infringement (not getting into whether fair use defense applies).
    - filoleg 7y ago
      >But they are infringing on the copyright of the work. They are infringing in the same way as pen and paper companies are infringing when you hand-write the contents of an audiobook on paper for personal consumption. I believe that most people would consider this being an allowable thing to do.