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Comment by chrisan | Hacker News Reader

> For the same reason you're not entitled to a free (or even discount) paperback if you buy the hardback, or why I can't return the paperback I dropped in the bathtub for new copy.

I think I need something better than that. You are talking about 2 physical items, I don't think anyone would argue just because you buy 1 product off the shelf doesn't mean you are entitled to the rest of the shelf

An audio book requires author, editor, publisher, actor, distributor

A digital book requires the same minus actor

Where as a physical book requires the same + printer, binder, possibly artists, typesetter, shipper

In this case the audiobook and digital book have same distributor, amazon

Say I want to whispersync The Way of Kings. I already own the audiobook but now I have to buy the Kindle version for full price, which is $9.99 (I double checked in a private tab to make sure amazon wasnt giving any discounts)

> Furthermore different companies have bought the rights to different versions of that story in different mediums, and they all want to earn their money back.

How am I not paying for the same thing twice? If there is some other entity involved I wouldn't mind paying a small difference for their service to bring it to that medium.

Why is it people get paid twice for contributing nothing to bring it to another medium?

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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.

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.

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.

This is not a great distinction because there are government imposed limits to the vendor imposed limitations, even if it is a "license". FSD will hold up with physical DVDs in American court, even if the vendor says they only sold you a non-resellable license to view the DVD. Court isn't going to care the vendor called it a license. The distinction is the jurisprudence regarding the medium, with a dash of vendor license agreement. Also how you purchased it and what a consumer would "reasonable expect" will probably come into play: if you buy 1M old DVD with license to not resell that you and vendor have physically signed, your FSD is less likely to hold up than if you bought one DVD at Walmart with an EULA.

FSD will hold up with physical DVDs in American court, even if the vendor says they only sold you a non-resellable license to view the DVD.

Right, because that's literally how the FSD was written. The sale of a DVD of "X" necessarily includes a license to view "X". The license is subordinate to the DVD (beause it is necessary for use of the purchased good), and because the FSD applies to the DVD, it also necessarily applies to the subordinate license.

if you buy 1M old DVD with license to not resell that you and vendor have physically signed, your FSD is less likely to hold up than if you bought one DVD at Walmart with an EULA.

No, the FSD still applies. You've just described Redbox, which actually fought and won this battle (about reselling used DVDs). It would be different if you bought a DVD that included a license for an online streaming version of the movie that couldn't be resold. Redbox fought and lost this battle against Disney. In a nutshell: Redbox can do whatever it wants with the physical copy of the movie, but the FSD doesn't apply to the streaming license that was bundled with the DVD and so they couldn't sell those separately from the DVDs themselves.

Yes, and I appreciate you refererencing the specific cases, because my main point, is that that is what matters. It is the jurisprudence that defines what limitations are allowed. Vendors will constantly claim "licenses" and "limitations" that are not supported by jurisprudence and would not likely hold up in court.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.)

> 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....

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.

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.

> 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.

If I utilize a copyrighted work in the creation of something new, depending on the level and quantity, my new work could likely be considered derivative of the original work.

I think Amazon will argue that that speech-to-text isn’t “creative enough” nor does it involve humans, and it is a purely mathematical function and this not covered.

Most likely this will not end in Amazon’s favor.

Replying to a reply of this. What copyright exhaustion? They just keep changing the rules to make it longer without the consent of anyone act we have no say in it. The average person in the US thinks the copyright length is insanely long. Legally if someone keeps changing the contract without the consent of all parties shouldn't that contract be null and void?

I agree that the duration is out of control, but that's not what the exhaustion doctrine is about. It's about letting a person who has paid for a license to IP to be able to use it without having to secure licenses for all the devices/platforms they want to use it on. It doesn't solve the interminable extension problem you mentioned, but it does moot the point raised by parent's comment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAI_Systems_Corp._v._Peak_Comp.... sorted out most of that

and yes hilariously for a couple weeks it was illegal to run software.

and yes hilariously for a couple weeks it was illegal to run software.

This simplification of the legal case is just as bad or worse than a movie saying they found America's launch code by hacking the dark web (in the movie's defense, they were focused on the fighting and explosions, IT accuracy was not on the top 100 items of their priority list.) It was never illegal for a licensee to run software they had licensed on their own computers.

The issue was whether an unlicensed repair/maintenance company, Peak, could run MAI's OS while repairing customer computers. The 9th Circuit said no. Congress subsequently changed the underlying statute so that repair companies could run computer software as part of their repair/maintenance duties.

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? :)

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.

I wonder how many months will elapse until Barnes & Noble has a page of fine print on everything stating that you're not buying the book, you're buying a revokable, non-exclusive license to possess the book, and that this license is voided if you attempt to do anything with the book except scan the words using biological optical sensors your possessed at birth into short-term memory only, and violation of this license is subject to...

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

>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.

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?

> You can accept the deal, reject it, or make a counter offer.

Or just get it from TPB or whatever.

> Why is it people get paid twice for contributing nothing to bring it to another medium?

I'm a little confused, but who are the people who are getting "paid twice for contributing nothing to another medium"?

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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).

>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.

No, they're not even remotely the same thing. It's like saying that English and Javascript are both programming languages because they use the same alphabet.

Pen and paper companies sell you tools/materials to create works. They don't know or care what you create with those works. For all they care, you could just eat the pen and paper. Importantly to this example: they don't transcribe the audio--you do. Your transcription is a derivative work and if a fair use exception does not apply, would be copyright infringement if the copyright owner cared to enforce it in these circumstances.

Amazon's Kindle transcribes the audio of an audiobook using software created by its programmers for the sole purpose of transcribing audiobooks. You don't do anything. Amazon does all the work, at your request. And that makes all the difference, because what Amazon is doing has pecuniary value and thus fair use would not apply to their actions.

I believe that most people would consider this being an allowable thing to do.

Most people also believe it's okay to speed. It's still against the law and it's not a defense to a speeding ticket when you get caught.

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.

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?

You do not. You have a license for the music video, which is the consolidated song+video adaptation of the underlying song.

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.

This would be wrong under US, EU, and even just international IP law generally. The lyrics, music arrangement, audio performance, and music video are all separate creative works. If you want to get technical, the choreography in the music video may itself be a separate copyrightable work.

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.

Licensing music videos for money is actually a thing that has happened since the 1980s. These licenses are separate from the right to consume a standalone non-video audio performance.

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...

Yes, and it was found to be fair use. Decades ago, the music labels tried to ban tape recorders on the grounds that they could be used to record radio broadcasts. The courts agreed, but said that such use would be fair use if the recordings were just for private use.

> 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.

This analogy isn't going to clarify things. First of all, I don't think it's necessary to bring opinion and speculation into this, e.g. "I would argue you do", if there is actual law here.

So with music videos and songs, I would be very surprised if owning a music video automatically and simply granted you a license to the song. Ignoring the fact that videos frequently feature tracks specifically cut and rearranged for video (Michael Jackson is an obvious example), I think the main issue is that songs and videos have multiple copyright holders, and it's too complicated to be a relevant analogy.

IANAL, but if I were to record a high-quality video of a live band performance, the video recording is my property. I can take it home, rewatch it, etc. But I think it's obvious that I don't in any way "own" the copyright to the song I filmed. I can't extract the audio, burn it a CD, and sell it. And I'm pretty sure I would have very few commercial rights to distribute the video itself, if the band members never signed modeling contracts.

> I assume, if they did, this argument went about as well as arguing you can’t record music off the radio...

OK, I don't think this is terribly important to debate, but are you implying that settled law says people have the right to record off the radio? That's definitely not my (amateur) understanding.

> 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.

This will sound like a quibble but I think it's fundamentally important to point out: text from an audiobook cannot be "extracted with 100% fidelity". Whether it's 100% fidelity or much worse isn't even the point. What you assert simply isn't so. But I'll be happy to admit I'm wrong if you find an audiobook from which you've extracted all the text content, perfectly, as well as supplementary text like footnotes, indices, headers, illustrations, and captions, and of course, page numbers. It goes without saying that visual data like layout and typography are also components of book with value, but I think you get my point.

> This will sound like a quibble but

I think that is a minor quibble. You're arguing against a point which is not really the important point. That is, that owning a license for the audio book means you also own a license for the printed book including all the extra creative work that went into it, like formatting, pictures, etc.

A lot of other people in this thread are arguing against that point too but I don't think they need to because it's not relevant to the Amazon case where the generated text version isn't taken from the official text version, so it doesn't copy any of the formatting/etc.

If you buy a music video, you can obviously legally listen to it while facing backwards and not seeing the images. So you do have a license to the song in the video like the GP said (if I understand him correctly). Of course you don't necessarily have a license to some other version of that song that somebody else has put additional creative work put into, however minor. That's surely obvious to everyone here and people seem to be talking past each other trying to point that out.

> I can't extract the audio, burn it a CD, and sell it.

No, but what this is about is saying "am I allowed to listen to just the music without also watching the video? Can I play it on my phone with the screen off? Or do I have to pay extra to do that?"

Yes, you can play it on your phone with the screen off. You're still playing the video and processing the graphical data.

What would not be permissible is stripping the audio track from the video to play separately. That would generally be copyright infringement and there are limited circumstances under which a fair use defense would apply.

To be clear, if you turn off a device's display when it's playing a video, it usually stops decoding the video stream from the container, because it knows the destination video framebuffer isn't visible. It's doing the same thing you're talking about—"stripping the audio track from the video to play separately"—just without writing down the result.

You can get the same effect without turning off your screen if you tell e.g. VLC to stream only the audio from a network video stream. All VLC will do, in that case, is to request only the audio segments of the stream, and not request any of the video segments.

Consider this another way: is a web browser infringing a website's copyright when it makes a "derivative work" of the page by blocking the ads on it?

Or, hopefully even clearer: is a CD player infringing the CD's copyright when it applies an EQ preset to the audio as it plays it?

There's a very fine point I'm trying to gesture at here—the point where something goes from being "the creation of an infringing derivative work" to "the way that a device which reproduces the work for the purpose of consumption, chooses to do that reproduction."

To be clear, you're still processing the same file. You're just not processing all of it for the sake of efficiency. If you want to get into the very technical details, then it depends very heavily on what type of codec you're using since some codecs interleave video and audio data, while modern codecs generally don't (and in fact require separate audio and video codecs).

Consider this another way: is a web browser infringing a website's copyright when it makes a "derivative work" of the page by blocking the ads on it?

Yes, under copyright law, since the article and the page are separate copyrightable works. The question is does a fair use exception apply? (For something like reader mode, the answer is likely yes, but it gets more complicated for an ad-blocker that just removes ads while retaining other elements of the page.)

Or, hopefully even clearer: is a CD player infringing the CD's copyright when it applies an EQ preset to the audio as it plays it?

No, the CD player isn't a person and isn't infringing anything. The user of the CD player is creating a derivative work by applying an EQ. An analogous case (several actually) discusses this point with respect to running computer software. Courts ruled that the copy was necessary for a user to "enjoy" (make use of) their license. And with respect to the EQ, a fair use exception would apply. And even if it didn't, then a compulsory license would apply (in the US at least), and you would owe the song creator a fraction of a fraction of a penny for every performance.

No, it's actually a very bright line. Either you're working with the original, or you're working with a derivative work. The question is whether your use of the derivative work you've created is covered by the license, or by fair use.

> What would not be permissible is stripping the audio track from the video to play separately

Even for personal use, where you aren't sharing the extracted audio? I am pretty sure that would be allowed.

Arguably it could be fair use but strictly speaking it's copyright infringement.

It's generally not worth the copyright owner's resources to pursue something like that unless it's happening on a much larger scale.

Fair use is not infringement.

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.

All the people who would get paid, since the only people doing extra work to create the AI written-version of the audio are Audible software engineers, and they aren't getting paid any extra when you enable the feature.

People selling something in general are not getting paid for their "contribution", they are getting paid because (a) they have something you want, (b) they ask for money to give it. They are getting paid for the ownership.

If I sell a plot of land I inherited from N generations ago, there was zero of my "contribution" factored in into the price (and perhaps zero of my ancestors who first got it contribution. Such plots might have just been up for grabs at the time). The price can still be millions for said plot of land -- it's all to demand, nothing to do with some compensation for "contribution".

In this case, the publishers (and owners of the story copyright) want to sell the 2 different versions separately.

It's as simple as that.

And you can complain about "useless middlemen, etc" but it could just as well have been the author that wanted to sell his stories as different deals for different mediums, and not e.g. allow automatic conversion from one format to another.

Usually, he who sells something sets the price for what you get (and determines what you get).

You might agree and buy it or not, but you don't get to force them otherwise, because you "really wanted X", or "you thought you got Y too", etc.

You're taking an example from the world of rivalrous goods and trying to apply it to the world of non-rivalrous goods (where supply is no longer a factor).

You then try to reframe copyright, from "Copyright is forcing consumers to overpay for some things" into (paraphrasing) "Anyone complaining about the current state of copyright law[1] is trying to force artists and publishers to live in poverty."

[1] Which is mostly the result of a century's worth of lobbying by IP holders with little to no effective counter-lobbying by consumers.

>You're taking an example from the world of rivalrous goods and trying to apply it to the world of non-rivalrous goods (where supply is no longer a factor).

Read demand as "people wanting the stuff" as opposed to "people wanting the stuff versus available stuff". I'm not talking about the law of supply and demand, but of, let's say, "willingness to pay to get the thing if no other way is available" (even if it's just for legal reasons that no other way is available).

>You then try to reframe copyright, from "Copyright is forcing consumers to overpay for some things" into (paraphrasing) "Anyone complaining about the current state of copyright law[1] is trying to force artists and publishers to live in poverty."

Nope. In fact I wouldn't care if some artists and publishers lived in poverty.

What I argue (and this is not about personal preference) is that the transaction is:

(a) publisher has something another person wants, sets price

(b) said person can buy it or not

We can imagine a setup that's just based on somebody owning the sole ability to sell a thing and its digital copies, and demanding whatever for it.

Scarcity, marginal cost of copy, etc, don't need to come into play.

People who is only authorized to sell gets to set whatever terms, even if those terms are "I want people to pay twice if they want the text version and the audio version" or even crazier.

That's the reality (and, more or less, the law).

We could make it like "Everybody is authorized to make as many digital copies as they want, for free, redistribute them, even put their names on the work" if we wanted.

It's not something set in stone, it's only set in the interests of publishers and in law. And while we can argue that the interests of creators are not the same, most creators tend to just sell their rights to/go along with the publishers, so the point is moot from a legal perspective.

>Which is mostly the result of a century's worth of lobbying by IP holders with little to no effective counter-lobbying by consumers.

Well, in life people don't get what the want/need/deserve. They get what they've managed to negotiate.

If consumers don't counter-lobby/protest/break some heads they'll get the laws ip-holders want.

> If consumers don't counter-lobby/protest/break some heads they'll get the laws ip-holders want.

If IP holders get too greedy, consumers will just pirate stuff. I mean, consider the situation for music vs films. Music is available at low cost through streaming services, and piracy is no longer a major issue. But piracy remains a serious issue for films, which are still priced way too high.

But I suppose that piracy is a form of protest, so hey.

Try starting from the author. The author invested his own time and wrote a thing, but for whatever reason didn't want to go out and sell it himself. So he sold a company the rights to print and sell text copies of the thing he'd written. He then sold the rights to sell audio books of his work to a different company (and perhaps the right to make TV show of his book to a third company).

The only reason a company was willing to pay for the rights to the text copy of the work was because they where being guaranteed some sort of monopoly. If that monopoly is weakened then they have less incentives to pay the author.

If that is a good or bad outcome is left as an exercise to the reader.

Do you think that's how it works in practice, any evidence?

I suspect the authors now are getting the same, or less, and the publishers are both charging more for digital (despite their costs being lower) and taking a higher proportion.

>the publishers are both charging more for digital (despite their costs being lower)

The costs associated with printing and distributing a physical book are a much smaller slice of the pie than a lot of people assume. (Back when I looked into this, it was about $2.50 per copy for a hardback as I recall. The author cost for a PoD trade paperback from Amazon is about $5.)

Also, in general, the end-user price for books is generally significantly lower than it used to be. Go back a couple decades and you mostly paid list price for books and paperbacks usually weren't available for a year or so after a book came out in hardcover.

>I think I need something better than that. You are talking about 2 physical items, I don't think anyone would argue just because you buy 1 product off the shelf doesn't mean you are entitled to the rest of the shelf

The whole publisher intention behind copyright and license rights is that you shouldn't think of digital products any differently than you think of physical products on a shelf.

In other words, the idea is that just because a digital product costs $0 to copy it doesn't mean it doesn't harm them business wise to make one and not pay them. A physical book/cd doesn't cost as much as its sold either -- it usually costs way way less. So "cost of physical copy" shouldn't be thought as the differentiator...

The whole publisher intention behind copyright and license rights is that you shouldn't think of digital products any differently than you think of physical products on a shelf.

They don't claim that at all. Digital items are typically licensed, not owned outright (as is the case with a physical book).

That said, the way the market is currently configured, audio books are a separate product from digital text. That's fine and legal. But, we don't have to like it. I have a legally blind* family member and it always feels a bit like a scam when she has to repurchase books that somebody else in the family already purchased.

* She can see, barely. For complex texts (particularly textbooks), she prefers to have an audio copy as well as the printed/digital text.

>Digital items are typically licensed, not owned outright (as is the case with a physical book).

You own an MP3 in the same way you own a book. If you email an MP3 to others in exchange for payment, the FBI aren't going to bust down your friends' doors and securely erase the files from their drives, it's up to the licensor to sue you for damages. Likewise, if you copy books and start selling them at the flea market, nobody's going to round up and destroy the unlicensed copies, it's up to the publisher to destroy you in court.

> How am I not paying for the same thing twice?

In some ways you are. This is the same pain the music industry went through when they went digital. People had purchased records, 8-tracks, tapes, and finally CDs often of the same music and often multiple times because those physical items wore out. Now I can buy a song once and it is effectively mine forever. Book publishers see what happened to the music industry and are fighting every way they can. A lot of times those fights do not make sense, but the industry has decided to fight everything.

Two different things. One is an audio performance, which you bought. It contains elements not in the print/ebook version.

The other is a print version of the same work. The purchase includes the formatting, editing, etc., that went into producing the print version which are not found in the audiobook version.

Why is it people get paid twice for contributing nothing to bring it to another medium?

Why is it that programmers get paid six figures to create just another database application? Aren't they all the same thing? No!? Well, it turns out that creating an audiobook and creating an ebook are two very separate things that each take a fair amount of work and that each deserve to be paid for.

Let's say you are an iPhone user and you have bought a bunch of media from Apple. Maybe you really hate the next iPhone announcement and want to move to Android. Would you expect Google to give you a free copy of all the media you originally bought from Apple?

Also you have to get away from the idea that the price of the content is dictated by the costs to produce that content. That production costs is only the minimum price that would allow production to continue. Prices for digital goods are often just dictated by what the seller thinks demand is (since supply is practically infinite assuming there are no contractual restrictions).

> author, editor, publisher, actor, distributor

...and someone to buy the microphones and recording equipment, and someone to push the buttons, and someone to edit the audio.

Which I paid for by buying the audiobook.

I'm asking the reverse, who is getting left out of collecting money when I purchase the audiobook and then want a digital copy for whispersync?

Do you think the audio-book publisher is the same organisation as the printed-book publisher?

You can usually get a discount on the audible version when you own the ebook, but not the reverse. It’s strange.

This doesn't make any sense. It's not zero-cost for a company that provides a book to also provide an audiobook. Both require their own supply and value chains. An audiobook will require recording studios, artists, a streaming audio product, an app, massive storage requirements, separate catalogues and search. The only aspect it shares with the book supply chain (which is also costly for the company) is the IP. It might make sense for Amazon to bundle the kindle/audible versions from a sales POV, but you have no moral right to owning a story in all formats- there are real costs and people involved.

> A digital book requires the same minus actor

The digital book also requires formatting work. Depending on the type of book and the publisher's workflow, this can be simple (an export from InDesign) or very complex (a custom process for converting a non-technical author's Word documents for a cookbook with an inconsistent layout into an EPUB that renders nicely across devices).

For the book you mention, The Way of kings. There are two audiobook publishers; McMillan Audio for the single voice work and Graphic Audio (a different company) for the multi voice.

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