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.

Totally disagree. Consider poetry, or poetic elements in literature, where the form of the text conveys meaning. That is lossily conveyed in an audiobook.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?"

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.

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."

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.

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."

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.

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

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

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.