Audible's closed caption feature copes with complaints from major book publishers

© Amazon

The e-commerce giant has caught the wrath of several renowned book publishers with the new feature of its subsidiary Audible.

Many book publishers of the world have agreed to file a complaint against Audible. The cause ? A captioning feature proposed by the e-commerce giant's subsidiary Amazon, specializing in audiobooks, the famous audiobooks for download. For the complainants, Audible would not have the necessary rights and would violate the copyright law.

The feature that turns voice into text in the collimator of publishers

Seven of the biggest publishers in the United States, Chronicle, Hachette, HaperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, Scholastic (known especially for holding publishing rights on Harry Potter and Hunger Games) and Simon & Schuster, filed suit Friday, in court in New York, to assert their rights. Proof that the story is serious and that the stakes are important.
Together, they pester against Audible Captions, a feature unveiled in July by the application, expected to be integrated into it in the course of September. Captions uses the automatic speech recognition technology, "Speech-to-text", to transcribe the audio into text, so that users can benefit from both functions at the same time, especially in the school setting.

A conflict over the rights of exploitation, that denies Audible

What penalizes book publishers is the rights allocated. Those necessary for the exploitation of audio books are not the same as those required to exploit it in written version. The principle is the same for a physical book and its electronic version. Both are distinct.

Thus, the plaintiffs see this as a terrible affront to copyright. Because until proven otherwise, Audible only has exploitation rights for audio versions of books. And publishers are afraid of suffering additional difficulties, while the e-book, yet promised a bright future, is seriously challenged by the audio book, booming.

A subsidiary of Amazon since 2008, Audible, she expressed surprise and explains that its functionality is not intended to convert the audio file into a book, allowing to track only a few lines of text.

Source: The Verge