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> 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.