Distributing audiobooks I&#39;ve narrated If I buy a book (ebook or printed) and narrate an audiobook myself, would it be legal to put it for sale? How about if I put them for free? Would it would violate the copyright of the publisher of the book? How about if you reverse the question, and write a manuscript based on an Audiobook, say with speech-to-text technologies? Would it violate the publisher's rights?
The copyright Act gives copyright owners certain rights: right to reproduce the copyrighted work right to prepare derivative works based upon the work right to distribute copies of the work to the public right to perform the copyrighted work publicly right to display the copyrighted work publicly The audiobook you create from a copyrighted work is a derivative work (perhaps it is a reproduction; for the analysis it does not matter). It works the other way also. A derivative work is a work based on or derived from one or more already existing works. Common derivative works include translations, musical arrangements, motion picture versions of literary material or plays, art reproductions, abridgments, and condensations of preexisting works. It is a violation of the copyright to create derivative works without permission. The commercial nature of the derivative work does not come into play in this situation. Commercial use might be an issue in a fair use defense, but fair use is not applicable based on these facts. Fair use might apply given facts such as: Ten students own copies of the printed work. These students are blind. A teacher reads the book and provides the recording to the students.
Interesting that they don't give a source and also don't link to anywhere (such as Wikimedia commons). So I assume that content is google's own. So generally speaking: No, when no license is provided, that means you can't use whatever it is in a project of yours (whether commercially or not), because the &quot;default&quot;, when nothing is specified, is that no license is given. So unless you find a license that grants you a permission on google's own content, these sounds can't be used freely.
Editing is protected speech under the First Amendment. The government may not require any license to perform such services, though an author could impose whatever credentialing requirements she chooses. If you have created a business to provide those services, that business may need to be registered with/licensed to business in the state generally, but again, it would not require any special licesnse to perform editing services. Whether you provide those services as an individual or as the agent of a business entity, any income you derive from editing is subject to taxation the same as any other income you receive.
Everything except the summary and the cover art are all facts; facts are not subject to copyright. The summary and cover art would be subject to copyright. You may have a fair use defence given that all you are doing is cataloguing the books.
Copyright is held by the person who puts the content out there in fixed form. If A reads a prepared text and B talks extemporaneously, A has copyright to his fixed text. Whoever then records the debate holds copyright to B's talk (not a typo). If that person is B, A can point out that A's copyright was infringed, presumably leading B to an equitable arrangement that would avoid copyright violation litigation. However, if the recorder is A, then B is hosed. On the other hand, if neither party has a prepared text, then the guy who does the recording has all the rights. And if both parties have prepared texts, nobody gets to record without a copyright agreement.
There is no such law; copyright secures exclusive rights for the copyright holder (and related rights sometimes secure certain rights for the author which cannot be sold or given away except through death), but it cannot be used to force them to spend money to distribute it in a form that you can conveniently use. Such a rule would defeat the purpose of copyright law, which is to give the copyright holder control over the use of the work, not take away their ability to do so. You can certainly request that they release the work, and can offer to pay them for doing so. But someone who does not own the copyright or any related rights cannot use copyright law to force the person who does own the copyright to spend their own money to convert a show into a new format.
When an author writes a book, it is frequently licensed to one company in the United States and another company in the U.K. If the publishing company Bathroom Books gets permission to print and sell the books pursuant to a license from the author in the U.S., that contract will usually include a non-compete clause that prohibits Bathroom Books from selling books it prints to retail customers in the U.K. or to wholesale customer that intend to sell the books at retail in the U.K., where the permission to print and sell the books pursuant to a license from the author has been granted to WC Books (and vice versa). The clauses are about enforcing the peace between distributors given different territories, because different publishers have better sales networks in different places. The first sale doctrine, clarified for purposes of U.S. copyright law in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley, makes the &quot;not for sale in the U.S.&quot; language inapplicable under U.S. law to a consumer who purchases the book in the U.S. and then resells it used to someone in the U.S. Whether it bars someone who purchased the books on a wholesale basis in the U.K. from reselling the books in the U.S. depends to some extent on the nature of the contract between the wholesaler and the publisher. For example, if the wholesaler is selling the books on a consignment basis for the publisher and has a right to return the unsold books without payment to the publisher and doesn't have to pay for the books sold until they are sold at retail, the first sale doctrine likewise does not apply. It also isn't entirely obvious that the &quot;first sale doctrine&quot; makes it illegal to count U.S. sales towards the amount due to the U.S. publisher rather than the U.K. publisher, even if they are sold by WB Books instead of Bathroom Books. (Re the faux names of the publishers, one of the first books I every handled copyright and licensing for, a year out of law school, involved bathroom humor.) Also, if the case ends up in a U.K. court before it reaches a U.S. court, the first sale doctrine may or may not apply, but Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley will not be binding precedent, so the applicable rule of law might be different. And, it isn't hard to write a binding forum selection clause that insures that the case would be resolved in a U.K. court rather than a U.S. court if the law in the U.K. were more favorable.
The author of the book may have a copyright, because he created a new piece of work from the/a original work. For example, by translating it in another language or in a modernized language, by rearranging the content, by adding images or commentaries etc. You will therefore have to find a book or other source that is not or not anymore copyrighted.