Amazon’s Audible settles copyright clash with publishers
Amazon’s Audible has reached a settlement with major publishers over its plans to introduce captions to recordings.
On Monday, January 13, Audible’s lawyer Emily Reisbaum, partner at Clarick Gueron Reisbaum, sent a letter to the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, stating that the “parties have resolved their dispute”.
Announced in July 2019, the app at the centre of the clash, Audible Captions, shows text on screen as a book is narrated.
It had been slated to launch in September 2019, but the month prior, several book publishers filed a joint copyright infringement suit against Audible, accusing the Amazon.com company of taking the publishers’ audiobooks and converting the narration into “unauthorised text and distributes the entire text of these ‘new’ digital books to Audible’s customers”.
Seven members of the Association of American Publishers, including HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, claimed that Audible’s new mobile app feature would take copyright-protected works and repurpose them for its own benefit.
At the time, the publishers claimed that Audible’s action is “the kind of quintessential infringement that the Copyright Act directly forbids”, adding that Audible hadn’t sought a licence for the creation of the transcriptions.
The publishers went on to claim that Audible doesn’t maintain the quality control “that readers have come to expect from the publishers”, and alleged that Audible had admitted to publishers that “up to 6% of the text may contain transcription errors, the equivalent of 18 full pages of a 300-page book”.
Just a few days later, WIPR reported that Audible would not enable its new Audible Captions feature for the audiobooks owned or exclusively licensed by the publishers that had brought the suit.
At the time, Audible said it was “surprised and disappointed” by the suit and the implication that it hadn’t been working with the publishers on the creation of the feature.
Earlier this week, in her letter to the court, Reisbaum requested that the parties have until January 21 to allow them to obtain signatures on the settlement documents. Details of the settlement have not been disclosed.
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