In Managing Intellectual Property, IP Litigator Examines Copyright Infringement and Machine-Generated Content Case

In The News
August 29, 2019
Attorneys:

IP litigation counsel Evan Gourvitz (New York) was quoted in a Managing Intellectual Property article published on August 25 examining a lawsuit by the Association of American Publishers against Amazon-owned Audible audiobook distributor that involves copyright law and machine-generated content. The AAP recently sought an injunction preventing Audible from offering a new service that would transcribe and display the text of narrated recordings.

Mr. Gourvitz explains that Audible’s plan appears to be a reversal of the usual argument that owners of text works should make machine-generated audio versions freely available for visually impaired people. In this case, Audible is reverse-engineering text works from the audio versions, which could arguably compete with the text versions. He notes that Audible could be seen as trying to appropriate a valuable right from publishers and authors.