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Author's Guild Says Kindle's Text-To-Speech Software Illegal
Mike writes "The Author's Guild claims that the new Kindle's text-to-speech software is illegal, stating that 'They don't have the right to read a book out loud,' said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. 'That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.' Forget for a moment that text-to-speech doesn't copy an existing work. And forget the odd notion that the artificial enunciation of plain text is equivalent to a person's nuanced and emotive reading. The Guild's claim is that even to read out loud is a production akin to an illegal copy, or a public performance."
Do you hear the sound of the words echo through your head as you read words, like me? Well, as the copyright owner of this comment, I forbid such usage- and deny you the ablity to read this comment out loud to your friends either.
Seriously though, despite this being a rediculous idea, what is the Authors' Guild actually trying to do here?
I mean, if anybody is really pushing to create more copyright holder rights, it's Amazon and the Kindle. Let's review...
-The right to not let my friends borrow my book when I'm finished reading it? Check.
-The right to not resell my book on the used books market when I'm done? Check.
-The right to having access to my books revoked on a whim if my provider goes out of business, or *gasp* decides it's not a profitable market (MSN Music, I'm looking at you)? Check.
With all these rights landgrabs that Amazon is making with their digital books on Amazon (and heck, digital media in general), I'd assumed they were colluding with the Author's Guild. I mean, if nobody can share your books, and nobody can help spread the buzz surrounding your great ideas or fiction... that means you'll make more sales... right?
To hell with all of them. I'll read quietly, or out loud when ever I please. And just for being assholes, I'm going to pirate the next book published by a guild author. And I'm going to listen to Microsoft Sam read it to me. And I'm going to pretend to like it.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
Sometimes I read a portion of a book out loud - to myself - in order to slow down my thought processes. It is akin, I think, to taking notes when being lectured. The act of reading out loud alters both the rate and the quality of my understanding of the text.
Which, according to Paul Aiken, means I'm a criminal.
Speaking as the owner of one of the oldest SF-specialized literary agencies in the country, and as someone who is quite interested in protecting author's rights for all the obvious reasons, I think Aiken has fallen off the cognitive cliff, and that he does no one - not authors, not consumers, not publishers - any favors by pushing this over-the-top interpretation of what an "audio performance" is.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
In the immortal words of Al Gore: Do they have a "controlling legal authority" for that interpretation of copyright law, or is this just a legal posture, that is not supported by law or precedent?
dave
This is indeed the road to Tycho.
When I was in high school, the director of our AV department waged a protracted battle with me over my making enlarged copies of sheet music in the orchestra. Never mind that this was a matter of vision accessability. Never mind that the school had allocated me a legitimately-purchased original, just as they did for each other student. Never mind that academic fair use would have been squarely in play even if the above hadn't been true, and certainly never mind that the law specifically forbade the reasoning behind his theory as to why fair use shouldn't apply.
I probably should've sued the district, but that's not how I roll.
My point, though, is this: There are indeed a subset of the population that believe content authors should have the right to profit from the fact that some customers have differing needs in how they can view said content. "You can't buy the regular edition and adapt it to your needs; you have to buy the special high-priced usable-by-you edition (if we bother to make one)".
...at bedtime. Well, my 5-year-old will (she can't read yet). Even my 9-year-old likes it when I read stories to them at bedtime. Little did I know that it was a criminal act...
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
Seeing as they haven't done a damn thing about any other text reader, I think they can safely go fuck themselves. Amazon is not making audio recordings of books, the user is invoking a program to convert text to speech and pointing it at a text they bought from Amazon.
Now if Amazon was selling the audio recording of the Kindle reading the book, then they would have a case.
Or more appropriately, Dracula. Out of copyright and freely available as an e-book.
Just play the Free audio book.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
Mixed results. I snuck around behind his back to get the copies I needed, with the support of the orchestra director and the principal. The district did order him to make the copies and initiated disciplinary action when he refused, but I don't think it ever led to anything. It was my senior year when he decided to pull this stunt, so I wasn't around long enough to see things through to know the final conclusion.
The closest example, actually, is if you were very good at reading books out loud, and you rented out a theatre, advertised that you were going to read Harry Potter books, sold tickets, and had complete strangers pay to come in to listen to you reading them. The copyright holders would be quite within their rights to ask you to stop, because you've set up a textbook public performance of their work.
Note that the question isn't whether people who are in possessions of a book infringe the copyright by reading it out loud. The question is whether Amazon infringes the copyrights by selling both the e-books and a machine that reads them out loud. It's not quite the same as the textbook case shown above of a public performance of the work, but neither is it the same as privately reading a book out loud; the argument would go that there is no theater hall, but other than that, Amazon is "selling tickets" to the public to have Amazon read the work out loud to you.
So there is possibly a real question here as to where the line between public performance and fair use lies.
PS note that the argument is all about whether Amazon, which is the seller, is infringing the copyrights on the works that it sells. Contrary to what the bulk of the comments to this story assume, whether the buyers or people downstream from them infringe the books doesn't seem to be the problem here; if you have a copy of a book and you read it out loud to yourself, to your children or your friends, you're clear; these are not public performances of the work.
Are you adequate?
America is full of people who hate freedom. They claim to love freedom. They pay lip service to freedom until they are blue in the face. And to some extent they *do* love freedom...so long as only they have it.
What they hate is when other people (specifically, their customers) have freedom. They want to have tremendous control over those who might be their customers. They want to control every aspect of what these people do, so they can ensure that they extract every single cent they possibly can from their offerings.
They don't want people to be free to use a competitor's products, let alone to make any un-paid-for use of their own products. And, to this end, they must take control of pretty much everything such people do.
So they dress up this control in false language. They say that they are now "free" to earn a living off of a creative work. They mask all of their efforts at slavery by dressing them up as if they were a form of freedom unto themselves. But the truth is obvious. They are attempting to use the legal system (and, in many cases, technological options) to prevent "the masses" from being able to do what they want to do.
As an aside, some of the more pragmatic ones stop talking about freedom and instead try to make the case that if they cannot have absolute control then they will not be able to make any profit at all from their offerings, and hence there will be no offerings. The world will fall into an empty pit of cultural deprivation. A moment's reflection reveals the falsity of this sentiment...as well as reflection upon history or plain common sense. But to those of unclear mind this argument seems compelling enough...and the innocents wind up being indoctrinated against freedom.
The end result is that those of us who truly do love freedom have to fight for it...every day....until we die. The day we stop fighting is the day we lose it all.
Does Apple's agreement with the music labels spell out that Apple's customers are allowed to burn, for their personal use, CDs of the music they buy from the iTunes Store? This could easily be a case where there is an explicit agreement that Apple's customers are allowed to do that.
I don't know the terms of Apple's agreements with the record labels, but basically, I think your argument there isn't bulletproof; it could be the case that Apple secured that ability for iTunes users by negotiating with the labels, and not on the grounds you think.
I think the challenge here is that the Kindle e-book is in a proprietary format that's specific to the Kindle device. The print copy of the tabloid and the OCR software were not specifically designed with each other in mind. This is one reason why the grocery store seller doesn't need an ebook license to sell print copies of the tabloid; even if the grocery store (somehow) sells both the print copies of the tabloid and the OCR software, since these two products are in no way tailored specifically toward each other, the store can't be held responsible for whether the buyers use them together in a way that infringes the tabloid publisher's copyrights.
E-books for Kindle, on the other hand, are not designed to be usable without the Kindle device and/or whatever other software Amazon provides. Amazon can't as easily claim that what the e-book buyers do is the sole responsibility of said buyers, because Amazon itself is the agent making it possible for their device, which comprises a proprietary e-book reader and a proprietarily formatted e-book (or so will the argument state it), to perform a spoken interpretation of the work, which falls outside the scope of the license that was given to Amazon to publish the e-book editions of the books in question (again, so will go the argument).
There's one big unknown in this whole situation, that's not being talked about: what are the precise terms of Amazon's license agreement with the book publishers? A lot of the outcome of cases like this may well turn on that.
Are you adequate?
(from the don't-give-them-any-ideas dept.)
Is burning books illegal too? After all, that could be considered a political statement on the original work, one that is so deeply founded in the content of the work that it could be pretty much considered a derivative work of its own: Certainly, one could not make such statement if one would not have read the original text (or at least deeply pondered its cultural significance - as we all know, certain people criticise things they just heard about).
What is the Author's Guild going to do to stop that particular flagrant and deeply offensive misuse of author's rights?
</sarcasm>