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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!
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.