Publishers battle AI-generated audiobook piracy on YouTube
Source: The New York Times
The combination of text-to-speech technology and YouTube's scale has created a new arbitrage opportunity for pirates: synthesized audiobooks require minimal production cost while still generating ad revenue, forcing major publishers to hire specialized takedown services rather than rely on YouTube's DMCA process. YouTube's enforcement mechanisms lag behind the speed of AI-enabled infringement, transforming what was once a niche technical problem into a recurring operational cost for the publishing industry. Audiobooks have become valuable enough to steal at scale, but existing copyright tools cannot handle the volume.