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Book publishers sue Audible to stop new speech-to-text feature

Book publishers sue Audible to stop new speech-to-text feature

5 years ago
Anonymous $ZuTig1gZkQ

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/08/book-publishers-sue-audible-to-stop-new-speech-to-text-feature/

Seven of the nation's top book publishers sued Amazon subsidiary Audible on Friday, asking federal courts to block the company from releasing a new feature called Audible Captions that's due out next month. The technology does exactly what it sounds like: display text captions on the screen of your phone or tablet as the corresponding words are read in the audio file.

The publishers argue that this is straight-up copyright infringement. In their view, the law gives them the right to control the distribution of their books in different formats. Audio is a different format from text, they reason, so Audible needs a separate license.