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Authors Guild President Wants To End Royalty-Free TTS On Kindle
An anonymous reader writes "The president of the Authors Guild has launched a rant in the NY Times about how the Kindle 2 provides Text-to-Speech capabilities that, oh the horror, allow the user to have any text on the Kindle read to her. Roy Blunt, Jr. moans that this is copyright infringement of audio books, and that Kindle users should be forced to pay royalties on audio even though they've already paid for the text version of a book! Amazingly he harps on about how TTS technology has become so good that it may replace humans — and then uses this to argue that it's unfair for Kindle to provide TTS! I think the Authors Guild need a new president — someone less of a Luddite, and more familiar with copyright law." (See also the Guild's executive director's similar claims that reading aloud, royalty-free, is an illegal function of software.)
I'm sure the record labels pay much better for nutty speech than a bunch of writers.
What an idiot - doesn't he realize how wonderful it is that technology makes it possible for us to avoid paying the authors we like as much money as we used to?
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The NYT is available on the Kindle. I wonder how many people are using TTS to listen to his rant. I know funny, and that's funny.
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
FUCK OFF!
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{beeep} OFF!
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you poor misunderstood darling.
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go get em tiger - filthy pirates oughta be hung...
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let's do lunch.
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first post!
"I am not going to say it again children, Now come closer!" - Kindel in Christopher Walken mode.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
According to the Authors Guild logic, using a magnifying glass with a normal print book should be illegal, because then one gets large typeface for free?
And be ready with a credit card every time you hit the magnifying glass button in Acrobat Reader.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Call me a Luddite, but parents shouldn't let their Kindles take over parental responsibilities. They should let TV take them over like God (and the big media companies) intended!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I've bought a number of audiobooks based simply on the fact that Scott Brick narrates them. I wouldn't consider tts to be something able to replace a reader of his skill.
So you would love a bricked kindle?
Most of that value is surely the quality of the actors' voices - which also comes with a cost.
Both of those are avoided with the kindle's text-to-speech software, which presumably sounds something like a dalek.
Ergo, the comparison is a bag of rat knackers.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Well, my... that was quite the convincing argument! It nearly gave me whiplash. I bow to your superior oratory and reasoning skills, and forthwith recant everything bad I've ever said about unions.
Not!