They frame it as though it’s for user content, more likely it’s to train AI, but in fact it gives them the right to do almost anything they want - up to (but not including) stealing the content outright.
I anticipate a LOT of audiobook authors and publishers aren’t gonna be ok with that.
They don’t. The message right now is to boycott Spotify.
Except Spotify is one of the only hopes against Audible. Audible gives terrible deals to authors, if you sell your audiobook exclusively through audible they take a 60% cut of the sale, and if you sell through multiple audiobook stores they take 75%.
And that’s just the official numbers, according to this source they actually pay out even less than that. The average author’s cut for an exclusive title is only 21%, and for a non-audible exclusive is only 13%.
Large established authors get significantly better deals, but all the smaller authors desperately need audiobook rivals like spotify to be a viable alternative to Audible’s monopoly death grip on the industry. So it’s not as simple as “boycott spotify”, spotify or someone else badly needs to succeed in getting a meaningful slice of the market.
Thankfully there are alternatives out there, and we should be using them.
When discussions like this happen I think it’s good to actually suggest alternatives!
I don’t listen to audiobooks, but a lot of people I know use libro.fm
Also your local library probably partners with Hoopla and/or Libby which allows you to borrow audiobooks straight to your PC/phone!
Like what?
That is if they are aware of it. How many time do you just hit accept on a TOS agreement
Maybe it’s time people start taking their business elsewhere to show they are not satisfied with this deal.
I saw this getting traction on Tik Tok a few days ago warning rightsholders they have until, I think, Mar 5th to pull their content from the platform.
I can’t wait to hear what Brandon Sanderson says about this
Yeah I think they’re trying to slip one on us to train AI but we’ll see how rightsholders respond.
Are they already doing this for podcasters?
Yes, they are creating “derivative works” of podcasts when they translate them into new languages using AI:
Great! I can’t wait some assholes telling that this is progress and if you don’t like it go fuck yourself
Well that’s what happens when investors make techbros defacto kings.
If you’re pissed about it, blame capitalism.
I prefer blaming most of humanity which is not capable of having a minimal critical though
That’s only because we have to pretend that humans are inherently rational.
I totally agree that
Yeah I mean that’s what happens when a new innovation threatens to replace (or reduce/minimize) peoples’ jobs. Especially in a society where your job equals your ability to survive & live, people do NOT like getting their jobs “taken away” from them.
This is the perfect situation in which consumers could just stop buying audiobooks from them and the problem would be solved, but noooo. Most people will prefer living with this shit because they cannot stop using Spotify. Great! I love humanity’s awesome hability to consume crap from everyhere and everyone and still be grateful for that
This is why you upload the most absurd shit that makes no sense, if you’re a well known audiobook author. Just remove all your stuff and replace them with nonsense so that way if they try to train off you, they get a little nonsense.
I wonder how many of these policies are being created in companies privacy policies not because of AI, but because it gives a “reason” to allow collection of all user data?
A little from column A, a little from column B…
And so the enshittification continues. This time not for the consumers. Not yet.
This is probably so that they can create translated versions of them, so if your audiobook is only in English and you upload it you can check a box to have it also be available in other languages you’d never have been serving otherwise.
It’s almost certainly expanding on the same service they added for podcasters:
(A translation is a derivative work.)
Likely. They want something for nothing - free translation without paying a translator, licensing an official translation, paying a voice actor, etc. If the TOS only said that it would already be extremely problematic.
In fact the language is so much more broad than that.
I mean, at a certain point this kind of thinking becomes like the MPAA’s math around thinking every person downloading a movie from a streaming service was a lost sale.
Yes, this would mean a massive expansion of translated audiobooks without the labor that traditionally would have gone into creating them.
But we don’t have translations for the majority of audiobooks in the majority of languages because the costs of that labor has historically outweighed the benefits of a potential expanded audience in niche languages for the long tail of audiobooks.
Personally, I’d rather live in a world where there’s broad accessibility to information for all people regardless of their native languages, rather than one in which humanity tears down its own tower of Babel to artificially preserve the status quo.
Ah yes the “labour should be free” / “but if we have to get permits from every artist we won’t be able to feed our AIs!” argument.
Listen, I’m not gonna lie. it’d be wonderful if we lived in the utopia where everything is autotranslated for us (not to mention it’s done correctly, no “Brock’s jelly donuts”). But there’s 123456 ways to get it done with human labour properly paid and the corporations are in the position where they have the power and the responsibility to do it. Else authors are going to end up with automated translations which are sold as “official” but over which they don’t have control, in particular if the AI translation misrepresents them (using language the author wouldn’t changing concepts, or even - imagine - adding slurs).
Like, sure, maybe these corpos don’t want to pay for someone to do the translation from scratch… but have they thought of looking for fandom translations and sourcing and paying for those? That’s work already done, and has the advantage that someone cared enough about the “niche work”, kinda like with anime fansubs. Or they could also, you know, novel idea and all, pay people a wage to translate this. I know. The horror. How dare I suggest that a company doesn’t divert wages and income to the CEOs!
I hope that once enough people get replaced with automation, they’ll realize how shit capitalism is and push for harsher corporate tax to fund UBI.
That’s fair, and I have no problem with authors employing machine translation in order to translate their works. However, I happen to think that that should be the writer’s decision.
Most authors would much rather employ a professional translator to get it right instead of a computer to approximate it. He
However, I happen to think that that should be the writer’s decision.
I don’t know why you think it won’t be.
What, you think Spotify is just going to do it without the uploader choosing whether the feature is turned on or not?
The podcast translations are opt-in. Why do you think these won’t be the same thing?
IIRC this is because Spotify wants to generate translations for these audiobooks in the original voices. At least, that’s what I think I remember from a long time ago.
Sure that’s what they claim but their changes aren’t restricted to that.
It’s like saying “I want to take a knife into a knife free zone because I need to peel my apple for lunch.” then stabbing everyone and claiming ‘You’re the ones that agreed to let me have the knife’.
Spotify wants to generate translations for these audiobooks in the original voices.
Would an author be able to claim trademark infringement? Not to mention libel or slander, if the translation says something the author definitively wouldn’t (and obviously hasn’t)? Such as, say, AI inserting slurs.
I remember reading about voice actors being asked to sell their voice for something aimed related. Could be this.
Maybe they just want to include clips of the audio book in user’s yearly review thing.
That’s plausible and I’m a little rusty on my IP here but I would call that a fair use. Derivative works use existing work in a new way, where the added creativity is sufficient to make the new work itself copyrightable.
What’s Spotify?
WINK
i think it’s like TIDAL, but for right-wing dickbags and Rogan-bro’s.
Yet another example of why if you can’t download DRM-free files of your media, it’s not worth having. Spotify is absolute trash and I have no idea why it’s as popular as it is. Get you some damn MP3s/Ogg Vorbis/FLAC/whatever DRMless copies of your audiobooks and music and to hell with this streaming shit.
So…in the future you might want to consider actually reading the article before commenting.
DRM has absolutely nothing do to with this.
But that takes a tiny bit of knowledge and most of humanity is so stupid they don’t even realize their phone has a directory structure.
Guess it’s time to get back on the apple music train
Fuck apple, download full albums in lossless format via torrent.
Meh that’s not really an option if you’re into indie music
Am I missing something? To me this just seems like standard legalese to avoid petty lawsuits. The derivative works clause even give transcription as an example.
The moral objection part seems more strange but maybe it has something to do with playlists or tagging.
Yes, you’re missing the fact that every service that has made this kind of update has gone on to abuse it. Hell, at this point it’s just factual to say that EVERY service update from ANY data collecting service will be used to fuck you over.
