Court Should Deny Amazon's Motion to Dismiss Copyright Suit, Says Plaintiff

The court should deny defendants Amazon, Audible and Blackstone Audio's motion to dismiss parts of a copyright infringement lawsuit, said plaintiff Teri Woods Publishing (TWP) in a Friday memorandum of law (docket 1:23-cv-00507) in U.S. District Court for Eastern New York in Brooklyn.

“Downstream defendants” Amazon.com, Audible and Blackstone jointly moved last month to grant their motion to dismiss TWP’s complaint with prejudice, saying the lawsuit “should never have been brought” (see 2304110037). They requested an oral argument before U.S. District Court Judge Dora Irizarry at a date and time to be determined by the court.

Moving defendants Amazon, Audible and Blackstone said in their motion to dismiss they can’t be held liable for copyright infringement because their distribution via audiobook of 20 books, whose copyrights are owned by or licensed to TWP, was authorized in a 2018 license agreement with defendant Urban Audio Books (UAB), which sublicensed its rights to the other three defendants.

The court should deny the motion because moving defendants’ interpretation of the license agreements “conflicts with the contract’s overall structure and purpose -- to generate as much royalty revenue for TWP as the market allowed,” said the memorandum. Moving defendants “fixate on contract language” about technology and delivery means but ignore provisions on “sales and distribution methods” that restricted TWP’s grant of rights to audiobook versions of works sold or rented to listeners on a per-unit basis vs. those made available for free through credit redemption or in excerpted form, it said.

The license agreement “says nothing” about distribution of TWP works through subscription services, membership-credit redemptions, “let alone for ‘free,'” and nothing about allowing listeners to access excerpts “or to pay on less than a full read,” said the memorandum. The agreement granted UAB “exclusive unabridged audio publishing rights, to manufacture, market, sell and distribute copies throughout the World, and in all markets, copies of unabridged readings of the following literary work(s) and title(s) [as] audiobooks," it said.

At this early stage of the case, TWP has pleaded a “plausible claim” that moving defendants “exploited” TWP works in a way that exceeded the scope of the limited rights granted to UAB in the license agreement, said the memorandum.