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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
Shes going to be pissed.
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.
I'm pretty sure the blind have been using this sort of software for years, in fact I'm sure of it. Are they also going to threaten Apple and all the other software vendors who supply this much-needed resource for the blind? Did they even *think* about the deeper implications of what they're saying before firing the opening volley in what is, at its heart, a blatantly pissy money grab?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
All this revolves around are audio books sales. Forget the fact that right now synthesized text to speech is painful to listen vs a human voice, this is just another case of technology slowly making one industry obsolete.
They might as well sue teachers or those libraries that offer children's programs by reading a book out loud.
They say nothing makes more problems than solutions, and I feel the concept of intellectual property taking this to extreme.
Does this meant that my blind friends who use JAWS to read websites are breaking the law or infringing copyrights? Another excuse for a lawsuit or settlement...
-- For evil to triumph it is enough that good men do nothing.
So waitaminute...by Aiken's logic, wouldn't screen readers and other accessibility tools fall under this category as well? That's a losing battle if ever I've seen one...urm, heard one.
Posterity, my posterior.
Also, there will be a small royalty charge for moving your lips as you read. This has two benefits. There will be fewer people moving their lips as they read. And there will be fewer people reading.
-Loyal
I aim to misbehave.
Before the days of IT technology producing sound from text required a performance.
Now sound from text is a programmed translation. No more different or complex than the rendering of the book PDF information on the screen.
Welcome to the information age. Data is data and rendering translations are done all over the place, ascii to display bits. HTML to display. GIF, JPEG to images, MPEG to sound, MPEG to video. ascii, pdf or html to sound is no more difficult or complex. Just a little newer.
I'm sitting here thinking that no lawyer could possibly be dumb enough to advise their client with this legal theory. Even if we accept this concept at face value (which it does have some value related to public performances and derivitive works), fair use throws a huge monkey wrench into any potential lawsuits. Courts have repeatedly held up that once you are sold a copy of a product, you are entititled to privately do whatever you want with it. That includes space and time shifting. Text to speech is just another type of space shifting. i.e. Moving from one medium to another.
Then I realized that there's no way Mr. Aiken is serious about these threats. He's posturing in an attempt to force Amazon to rethink the text-to-speech in light of their audio book business. This becomes especially clear based on the response from an Amazon spokesperson:
So never fear! The world isn't quite upside down yet. This is just business as usual. Someone's trying to play a weak hand and hopes the other side folds. (Good luck with that.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
This is indeed the road to Tycho.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Rumor has it that if they are successful, the Authors Guild will next file suit against God for providing a source of light outside in daytime.
Same authors guild who want a royalty on all used book sales?
Guys, do the world a favor, go play in traffic.
Ladies and gentlemen! A full-contact legal battle for the ages!
In this corner, we have the Author's Guild, with the full weight of American copyright law behind them.
And in this corner, we've got the National Federation for the Blind, swinging a big stick: the Americans with Disabilities Act!
Gentlemen ... FIGHT!
Slashdot comments are not legal advice. Run them past your attorney if you have questions.
By their reasoning, all of my elementary school teachers are criminals.
Not exactly. The performance of a work as part of face-to-face teaching takes advantage of several limitations of copyright's scope, both implicit in fair use (17 USC 107) and explicit (17 USC 110(1)). Besides, 17 USC 110(4) would appear to make this whole article not apply.
How do they respond to the ADA and various regulations that mandate things like designing websites so that they can be read by screen readers? How's this any different from that? Just think--millions and millions of parents are now copyright infringers for reading "Goodnight Moon" or "The Cat in the Hat" to their kids!
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
"Once upon a time, Natalie Portman had a big bowl of hot grits..."
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Spend the $.41 or whateverit'satthesedays for a stamp and scribble down a short note telling them to get Aiken to STFU.
Add a disclaimer at the bottom indicating that Aiken must read the letter himself (it can't be read by his secretary to him) and that he must not move his lips while doing so. Anything else would require that he pays audio royalties to the author of the letter. He can't have it both ways.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
How are we expected to take organizations like this seriously when they make claims like this? I mean, really?! So blind people who use text-to-speech software in order to "read" books have been breaking the law?
Basic suggestion: get 50 people. Go to the "Author's Guild" offices, stage a sit-in, and everyone start reading some book aloud.
To make it REALLY funny, make it a freely-available Creative Commons book. Maybe Free Culture by Lessig.
The article only covers a public comment by the head of the Authors Guild.
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
No I paid extra to have Stephen Hawking read the book.
I think the point here is that what current text to voice converters are ghastly, this will not always be the case. In the future you will be able to have Marylin Monroe or John F. Kennedy read your book outloud and it will sound exactly right.
They are selling the book in a DRM form precisely so they can split the reading rights from the voice rights. Ideally they can make more profit that way. You are free to buy it in both forms. You might not like that but if there is competition in the market one can presume an efficient market can deliver each at a lower cost as a result of the extra profit to be made. So in theory it could benefit the consumer. And indeed the DRM versions are cheaper than than the print version in many cases.
You might object to that because it seems like you lost some traditional right of ownership. But until people invented text -to voice converters you never missed this did you? it's only when this became possible that you noticed that they did not want you to do it. so it's not a traditional right. Moreover, if you read the book out loud yourself then sold the recornding you would have been sued.
SO they do have a point.
The place where it goes off the rails is if you use this to listen to the book with no intention of reselling the voice conversion. What's wrong with that? DOn't you "own" it.
I think the answer is that, it's not you that committed the infringement, it's Amazon for making it possible. Afterall amazon sells both forms written and audio. Now they are selling both for the price of the DRM written version. You can see why the booksellers are mad.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Of course. You read it aloud, record it and then process it through a speech-recognizing software, and - bingo! Encryption broken. It is more of an analog hole really. I am waiting anxiously for the equivalent of HDCP for e-books. Perhaps a device that scramble the letters if it hears you reading the text. It will be mandatory in every ebook reader or consumer oriented OS, of course, or else you can't upload text to it. The IP must be protected at all costs from these damn pirates.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
A performance is *not* a copy. Under 17 U.S.C. 101, a copy is a *material object*. It also has to be "fixed," which (again S. 101) means the copy has to exist for "more than a transitory duration."
No derivative work is created here, either because the creation of a work means fixing it in a copy or phonorecord, neither of which is happening here.
Tepples already addressed your public performance point, so I won't reiterate that.
When looking for schoolbooks for the severely dyslexic little brother of a friend we tried looking for audio books. Turned out there was an organisation which used to deal with that here. Notice "was". For schoolbooks which had no audio book available from the publisher they'd got teachers who volunteered to record audio books for blind students. Guess what the publishers thought of that. Now they aren't allowed hand out recordings to blind students and the publishers aren't interested in making or distributing any since the market is so small.
Did you check with Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic? They do require documentation of a print disability for membership.
The Guild may actually have the more "just" position. Authors, with the exception of that rare 1 percent of best sellers, are not particularly well compensated. They do it because they love the profession and have some uncomfortable compulsion that makes them write, despite a average hourly salary measure in pennies.
Currently, a mid-level author has several payment streams potentially -- one from the books themselves and one from audio recordings. The Kindle threatens to eliminate one of those payment streams. Will the world really be better off if writers get paid less than they already are?
I think the Guild is doing exactly what any membership organization should do -- advocate for its members.
That makes no sense, and has nothing to do with the matter at hand. This has nothing to do with "public performances," and is actually about "derivative works." Two TOTALLY different things. Did you even read the article? Because it's quite clear that the argument is about audio derivatives, not public performances, and your claim doesn't even really make much sense if you consider the legal definition of "public performance."
To clarify and educate; the Author's Guild is claiming that the Kindle's text-to-speech feature effectively is creating audio "derivative works," whenever it's employed, and copyright law reserves the right to audio derivatives for the author. This has nothing to do with public performances, and I don't know where you got that idea.
No, not quite. The argument wouldn't run simply that the seller is selling both an e-book and a device that can read text out loud. That is certainly allowed. The problematic case is the one where somebody sells a device that simultaneously comprises an e-book reader that can read books out loud, and e-books in a proprietary format intended to work only in that e-book reader.
If the e-books were in some standard, open format, and there was a competitive market for devices that could read e-books in that format, then this story could well be different, because the party that provided the e-books could easily be a different party than the one that provided the text-to-speech feature; and thus, the first party could quite easily disclaim responsibility for what the second party does, while the second party could claim that it is not bound by any agreements with the copyright holder, and that it just is providing a shortcut for something the users could already do (extract the text from the e-book and pass it through text-to-speech software). And even if the e-book seller and the device seller were the same party, the existence of such a market would help, because they could argue that their relationship to the publisher qua e-book seller and their relationship to the user qua device seller are severed by the existence of such a market.
The way things are with Kindle and its e-books, however, is that Amazon can't claim to be offering two clearly severable things. Their e-books don't work without their reader, so the publisher can try to argue that the work in question is the combination of the e-book file with the Kindle device, and not the e-book file itself. The question is whether this argument will succeed.
Are you adequate?
Neil Gaiman has expressed his opinion of this issue in his blog.
My point of view: When you buy a book, you're also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the voices properly, and no-one's going to confuse it with an audiobook. And that any authors' societies or publishers who are thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and promoting what audio books are and what's good about them with it.