📰 Audible Settles Copyright Lawsuit With Publishers Over Audiobook Captions

After months of back and forth, Audible has settled in a copyright lawsuit with major publishers over its plan to introduce captions to their recordings, a proposal that the publishing houses argued was simply reading. The Guardian reports: In July, the audiobook company owned by Amazon announced Captions, an additional function for the existing app that would allow customers to read the text as it was read, as well as looking up words and translating them. Captions had been slated to launch in September 2019. But while Audible maintained that Captions "does not replicate or replace the print or ebook reading experience" and said it worked within the framework of copyright law, the publishers were unconvinced after seeing demonstrations. Seven publishers, including the "Big Five" -- Penguin Random House, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and Macmillan -- sued Audible in August, a move that was also backed by bodies representing authors and agents. "Audible Captions takes publishers' proprietary audiobooks, converts the narration into unauthorized text, and distributes the entire text of these 'new' digital books to Audible's customers," said the lawsuit. [...] In a letter filed this week in federal court in New York, Audible's attorneys, writing on behalf of both sides, announced that the parties had resolved their disputes and expected to submit the settlement documents by January 21. No other details were provided.

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