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.)

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.

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.

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.

I'm not sure how useful any of this is anyway though. I took another look at Amazon Transcribe a couple weeks ago and reached the conclusion that its transcriptions are still pretty bad compared to a human doing it. You get the general gist so long as it's a clean recording but there are lots of errors.

Standalone software is going to be even worse.

Imperfect captioning is better than nothing in some cases. But who wants to read a book--much less use it as a learning tool--when there are errors every other sentence?

ADDED: It really doesn't seem like much of a threat to publishers in its current form. Probably lots of errors and the text is only delivered a few lines at a time as the book is read aloud. However, I can see publishers looking down the road and imagining much improved ML transcription and larger blocks of text as something that's legally indistinguishable.

Really the only actual answer to that question is because a lawyer convinced a judge to say that they can't. If they can get a better lawyer and/or a different judge then maybe all of sudden they can.

It's kind of like how just because you have a pair of scissors it doesn't mean you are entitled to cut people's hair (without a stylist license). Or how just because you own a scalpel you aren't allowed to practice medicine (without a medical license). The government has determined that these behaviors need to be regulated. Perhaps you agree about regulating the surgery but don't agree about regulating haircuts... that's a matter for the political process.

In a similar fashion, Congress has passed laws on copyright that specifically say that if you own a copy of a work you can do anything you want with that copy, but you cannot make a new copy in a different form. This made sense when "a copy" meant a physical book, but that law isn't necessarily worded in a way that makes sense for electronic documents. I am old enough to remember when people tried suing over web servers, because when the browser received the file it made a local "copy" of the document in memory (without a license). The courts eventually settled on an interpretation that roughly said "ephemeral copies made during the process of delivering the work don't count as 'making a copy'". But they also settled on an interpretation that said "changing the medium -- like going between text and audio -- does count as making a copy".

So text-to-speech (or speech-to-text) converters are illegal; or, more precisely, using them on any copyrighted work (which is just about every work) is illegal without the permission of the copyright owner. Maybe not the best law for today's modern world, but it's the law we have and entrenched power groups would resist any attempt to change it.

I strongly suspect that would hold up in court in the US. For the same reason that I can alter the book and story in my own personal context of ownership. I can take the story, the book, and rewrite it for personal consumption, while keeping all of the original content in my new version. What I can't do typically of course is sell that version, distribute it commercially.

I could use a note taking system that pulls pieces from a physical book as I read it, or snap photos of pages I find interesting. Or I could do that manually with the audio version and take notes of the audio book as it progresses. Both approaches - and numerous others like them - would be protected so long as you're not trying to make money from what you're doing.

You could run your own text-so-speech conversion (or vice versa)for your own private use on fair use grounds because it's a textbook case of fair use. It's very different when you're doing it for someone else's use. There are plenty of situations in which even commercial conversion activity would qualify as fair use.

Generally agree with what you wrote. Money isn't the central question though. Something like fanfic distributed for free can still be infringing.