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.)
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.