There\u2019s an argument to be made that audiobooks are the finest form of content. You take a book\u2014already off to a good start\u2014and you get to have someone read it right into your ears. And when I say \u201csomeone\u201d I mean the GOATs in the voice game. I could cite examples of celebrities you never knew narrated audiobooks, but here\u2019s a sample of Werner Herzog narrating his memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All\u00a0that I think speaks for itself:<\/p>\n
What could be better than this?<\/p>\n
Not only are audiobooks heaven, you can probably get all the audiobooks you want for free (and legally) by getting yourself a library card and using your local library\u2019s preferred app (Libby<\/a>, perhaps).<\/p>\n I say all that, because given all the easy and free access to high quality audiobooks, why in the world would anyone listen to a John Grisham audiobook presented like this<\/a>?<\/p>\n Don\u2019t click that link. Instead of the actual audiobook, which is read wonderfully by Michael Beck<\/a>, it will take you to a YouTube video consisting of an AI narrator reading Grisham\u2019s recent hit novel the Widow, and the narration plays under 13 hours of AI slop video\u2014simulated stock footage of fake vacations, basically. It looks like the video they display under the lyrics on Hell\u2019s karaoke machine. I don\u2019t have any science to back this up, but it will definitely give you brain cancer.<\/p>\n As the New York Times points out<\/a>, 80,000 lost souls listened to the Widow this way. And Grisham is pissed about it. \u201cThe thieves and pirates who steal my work and try to profit from it, in any format, should be punished civilly and criminally [\u2026] And in this particular example, YouTube is complicit because it\u2019s clear they know what is happening and refuse to stop it,\u201d Grisham told the Times in an email. He should really write about this.<\/p>\n YouTube, for its part, says the video is still up because there hasn\u2019t been a takedown request, and that it doesn\u2019t proactively police for copyright violations. \u201cFor more than two decades, we\u2019ve built systems that help rights holders manage and control their copyrighted content \u2014 investing continuously to make sure those systems evolve as new threats emerge,\u201d Jack Malon, a YouTube spokesperson, wrote to the Times.<\/p>\n If you\u2019ve ever had a YouTube video flagged for a copyright violation, it may have been because of a feature called Content ID that music publishers absolutely love. It allows copyright holders to crawl YouTube and automatically detect copyrighted content. At times, Content ID has been a valuable moneymaking scheme<\/a> for copyright holders, who were able to zero in on incidental\u2014or even accidental\u2014uses of copyrighted material, especially music, and by making a claim, monetize other people\u2019s videos. It can\u2019t do this anymore, but this is the sort of thing YouTube\u2019s copyright system has been designed to support.<\/p>\n As the Times points out, Content ID isn\u2019t great at finding AI-narrated audiobooks. The audio waveform of the content is not the same as the audio the publisher owns, which makes it tricky to know what to even scan for. The author holds a copyright on the text, which can be slightly changed by the creator of the YouTube video while still leaving the book largely intact\u2014good enough for casual listeners anyway.<\/p>\n This leaves publishers and authors to navigate the takedown process manually, which seems, judging from the fact that the Widow is still up, to just not be happening.<\/p>\n