Spotify just changed their TOS, giving them unprecedented rights to create "derivative works" from audiobooks
storyfair.net
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.
I hope not! I hope they interpret it this way and are willing and able to take action, by removing their catalog or maybe even a class action lawsuit. 
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?
I can't wait to hear what Brandon Sanderson says about this
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.
So, they want to create AI written and narrated audiobooks that use the voices of well known voice actors without paying them for the privilege? How is that supposed to stand in court?
It wouldn't be to save the cheap coat of a voice actor.
It's so they can play the audio to their AI for free without having to say it was fed a copywritten text. It would also get better at telling stories, depending on the quality it was fed.
But the main advantage is training it to follow a long verbal narrative. And decide if it's better to transcribe it for full reference, or just make a summary as the story goes and risk missing an important bit.
Then to repeat it in the AI's "own words". This would make a huge loophole for exploiting famous authors. If you feed AI the text, the author can argue it was trained on it. If the AI just listened to it and makes a summary and remembers the structure. Derivative works of famous authors can be claimed to be no different than a human emulating popular authors that they had read.
They're just trying to find a way around using the full text, and reading it aloud might be enough.
That’s some wild speculation there.
What you described would be a contrived and inefficient workaround that would have little to no impact on its legality compared to just using the underlying texts as part of a training corpus.
Not sure why you think Spotify wouldn’t want to eliminate the cost of voice actors and production. If you’re self-publishing, recording and producing an audiobook traditionally is a substantial expense. If Spotify can offer something like Google’s Auto-Narrated Audiobooks to authors, then that would enable them to bring those authors to Spotify (potentially exclusively).
Spotify’s goal also is not necessarily to imitate the voices from the existing audiobooks. There is a lot that goes into making an audiobook successful, and just copying the voice alone wouldn’t convey that. For example, pairing tone and cadence changes with what’s being narrated, techniques for conveying dialogue, particularly between different characters, etc.. How you speak is just as important as your raw voice.
That would allow Spotify to create audiobooks using those techniques without using the voice of anyone who hadn’t signed away rights to it. However I would argue that some of the techniques they would likely use are integral to a person’s voice.
It’s also feasible that Spotify wants to be able to take an existing audiobook and make it available with a different voice. This wouldn’t require the audiobook to have ever been trained on - they would just replace the existing voice in it with another while preserving the pauses, tone shifts, etc. (and possibly adjusting them to be appropriate for the new voice).
More closely aligned to the specific derivative work they mentioned would be to implement something like Kindle/Audible’s Whispersync, potentially in collaboration with a non-Amazon ebook retailer like Barnes&Noble or Kobo.
This is a much better take.
Intonation is huge, and something general models tend to have trouble with - especially with something like an audiobook, which is narration - it's very contextual in a way not found in almost any other form of communication. It even encapsulates every other form of context through dialogue.
And not only that - a lot of audiobooks have versions by multiple voice actors. And they might change a word here or there, but it's highly structured data - it's truly a treasure trove
I'd go a step further and say they really want access to the dataset - not just for audiobooks, but because this is a fantastic dataset to train very context aware (and silky smooth) text to voice.
Spotify probably doesn't have the chops to do this, but they might be trying to leverage the dataset - I'm not sure if they could sell it wholesale or not, but if nothing else they could "partner" with Microsoft or Google to train VTT capabilities into multi-modal LLMs (a pitch with all the buzzwords to make investors need to change their underwear)
Make the policy change, see if they can get it to hold up in the courts. AKA normal business practices for corporate America.
Voices can't be protected by copyright but there may be a legal avenue for someone like Morgan Freeman to sue if a voice is clearly a knock off of his voice AND he can make a case for it damaging his "brand".
I'd be impressed though if AI can write a novel without directly referencing a fictional person, place or thing that someone else made up. Stable Diffusion, for example, can make a picture of dog wearing a tracksuit running on the side of a skyscraper made of pudding in the middle of a noodle hurricane. But it didn't invent any of those individual components, it just combined them.
This is why we need laws for likeness rights. Every person should own exclusive commercial rights to their own face, voice, etc.
Now I want that image of the dog framed and hanging in my house.
Jesus, that's dark.
Edit: oh, my eyes skipped the word "image"
"Now I want that of the dog framed and hanging in my house."
Are ya sure your brain didn't skip a few more words?
;-P
What about when a talented comedian speaks in the voice of someone else? Should we just write a law that humans are allowed to do it, but machines aren’t?
Tell me you don't understand the difference between human creative work and """AI""" work without telling me you don't understand the difference between human creative work and """AI""" work
I don't. What exactly is the difference between me making a remix of someone's voice using software I don't understand and me telling software I don't understand to doing that slightly more?
There is no difference. My work involves tools, be they hammers or ML models.
name, image, and likeness can be trademarked.
No. This is very likely about translations.
The idea that they'll be creating an unofficial sequel to your audiobook and selling it without your permission or something is a pretty ridiculous leap that would be very unlikely to actually hold up in court.
Meanwhile no one had to pay me a royality if they use my picture and they call themselves a news service.
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:
https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-09-25/ai-voice-translation-pilot-lex-fridman-dax-shepard-steven-bartlett/
Great! I can't wait some assholes telling that this is progress and if you don't like it go fuck yourself
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
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...
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.
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:
https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-09-25/ai-voice-translation-pilot-lex-fridman-dax-shepard-steven-bartlett/
(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
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?
Because I wasnt born yesterday, and dont spend my time with my head lodged firmly up my own asshole?
Look at how broad that legalese is. Ask yourself if auto application would make them more money. Now count what 2 + 2 is on your fingers.
This will be an unpopular opinion here.
I'm not against AI but the rules have to be in laws and regulations. First, AI can't use copyrighted material without paying for it. It can't either use material without asking individually.
The second point is that AI can't created copyrighted material. Whatever an AI created, it's free of copyright and everyone can use it.
Third, an AI can't be a blackbox. It has to be comprehensive how it works and what the AI is doing. A solution would be to have source available code.
Fourth, AI can't violate laws, create and push misinformation, and material used for misinforming.
And, of course, anything created using AI has to be indentified as such.
The money is in what the AI can do, the quality of the result, and the quality of the code. All the other things isn't valuable.
Your third point is an active research topic, we can’t explain exactly what generative (and other) models do beyond their generic operation.
If we could explain it, it would just be another rules engine 😅
I imagine that if AI devs didn't sneak around copying people's works in bulk but instead asked for permission or paid for a license, artists wouldn't hate it like they do now.
My gut feeling says that's not entirely true. Generative AI has so many qualities that make could it offensive to so many people, I think we were going to see a pushback from artists regardless. The devs' shitty training practices just happened to give the artists a particularly strong case for grievances.
Yeah artists were fine with publishing companies doing this since the dawn of literacy but this time it is completely different
I'm fine with this as long as the "pay & ask" has an exception for non-commercial, open source projects, otherwise it would mean that only corpos can create models, and everyone else is SOL and thoroughly fucked, because they will pay a license fee to the platforms, and the platforms will just add a new TOS element that by using the platform you consent and withdraw your rights to compensation.
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.
Fair use doesn't exist in all countries though.
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.
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.
So why didn't they say "derivative works with content of equal sentence-level, character-level, name, and story-level meaning". I think it's gonna be used for something more than that. They want to update content to fit the woke agenda, and people will frame it as good.
Sometimes it's just because the lawyers who wrote TOS grab as much leeway as they can, even if it's just to make a translation.
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.
Guess it's time to get back on the apple music train
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.