Audible’s New AI Stories Test The Boundaries Of Copyright Law

Amazon’s Audible just launched a new feature where listeners have real-time conversations with AI-powered literary characters.

The experience begins with the character setting the scene, assigning the listener a role and establishing stakes. The listener responds in their own words, and then the character reacts.

Audible calls it “Interactive Story.” It is the first time a major audio platform has invited listeners to contribute to a story experience.

The feature lands squarely in the middle of the most contested legal questions about AI and copyright law. Could Audible expand the new feature to its entire catalog without infringing copyrights? And when listeners participate, do they create their own copyrights?

The answers are unclear, and the law is still catching up.

Where AI And Copyright Law Stands

U.S. copyright lawsuits against AI companies reached 140 cases in September, up sharply from 45 cases just over a year ago. They fall into two categories.

The first asks whether AI companies infringe copyrights by using protected works to build the model. The answer depends on the particular facts of each case, so courts have reached different outcomes.

A California federal judge ruled that Anthropic’s use of lawfully acquired books to train its AI qualified as fair use and not infringement. But the judge ruled that Anthropic’s use of books downloaded for free from pirate sites was infringement. Anthropic later settled the case for $1.5 billion, Reuters reported.

A different California federal judge ruled that Meta’s use of books it downloaded for free from “shadow libraries” to train its AI model qualified as fair use and was not infringement.

But a Delaware federal judge ruled that Ross Intelligence’s use of Thomson Reuters’ editorial content and annotations to train its AI legal-research tool was infringement.

The second category is whether AI outputs infringe the copyrighted works the AI learned from. Courts have not answered this question.