You may want to carefully consider the following info before feeding Speechify your writing, especially if it’s not been published, or is/will be published on kindle unlimited: bsky.app/profile/east...

Weitzman has built his entire brand around the fact that he’s dyslexic and wanted to help people with similar issues, but with Speechify’s business model he has actively normalized putting accessibility tools behind pay walls. He is not in this for the greater good.

Thank you! I’d love to hear what (if any) response you get. Weitzman himself only ever gave the excuses you see in this slideshow, never acknowledging that piracy of self published or unpublished work for profit is wrong and keeping the door wide open for future copyright infringements.

These should outline how the platform will interact with uploaded works and how they will ensure they won’t end up being sold on any of Weitzman’s apps without our permission. As long as Weitzman’s operations can’t verify who owns the copyright of a work, they shouldn’t be able to use it this way.

Weitzman never acknowledged that piracy of self published or unpublished work for profit is wrong, keeping the door wide open for future copyright infringements. As writers, we’ve asked that Speechify implement transparent guidelines for handling user-generated content.

Cliff only ever communicated with a few individual authors who contacted him directly and repeatedly, blocking people who addressed the issue on Twitter and quietly distancing himself from WordStream, apparently hoping we would forget it ever happened.

That’s great—I hope you mean Cliff? Because his silence on WordStream’s copyright infringements has been extremely telling. All we ever got from him was the justification you see in the slide above, which he (and his sockpuppet accounts) posted in comments on the original Reddit and Tumblr posts.

The Terms and Conditions are publicly available on Speechify’s website. The piracy was witnessed by thousands of us when WordStream was still fully operational with all the pirated work. I summarized that in this post here: www.reddit.com/r/AO3/s/Xmx4...

Be careful uploading your unpublished work to Speechify: bsky.app/profile/east...

Just be aware that by using Speechify to read your drafts you’ve given them permission to sell your work: bsky.app/profile/east...

You may want to consider using a screenreader for that instead of Speechify: bsky.app/profile/east...

Careful feeding Speechify your WIPs: bsky.app/profile/east...

Be careful using Speechify for your own writing: bsky.app/profile/east...