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.)

Comments

Advocacy organizations

[qbzzt]

People who head advocacy organizations, such as the Authors Guild, have to have issues they can push so as to get members of their groups to pay dues. If there are no real issues, they need to invent them.

Re:Advocacy organizations

[sweatyboatman]

not to get too far off topic here, but I don't think you've thought your proposal through quite enough.

I can think of 2 intractable problems with what you suggest:

1. employers will know they can abuse their employees with no consequences for at least as long as it takes to form a union. a period they can extend by using FUD to hamper unionizing efforts.

2. if and when the problem is actually recognized, how does one quickly and efficiently form an ad-hoc union consisting of thousands of members who live and work in disparate places?

healthy unions are as vital to our economy as healthy companies.

Let's do a reality check

[mangu]

Some books have special editions in large typeface, intended for people with eyesight impairments. These books are more expensive, because more paper is used in printing them.

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?

Re:Let's do a reality check

[MightyMartian]

It's not so much reading to your own son, but should libraries now have to pay twice because, shockers, they often have reading programs for kids where a librarian will sit down and read a book to a dozen kids. Heck, what about the classroom, where teachers will read to twenty kids. What about book clubs?

The whole thing is nuts, and shows just how far mis-managed industries will go to preserve their sacred cows in the face not only of technology but of basic logic.

Re:Let's do a reality check

[drquoz]

Actually, what he's saying is if you want to read aloud to your son, you're fine. But if you want to have your Kindle read to your son, you should pay a licensing fee. According to him, there's a difference, and that's where his logic fails.

Re:Let's do a reality check

[danlor]

Decent TTS in a widely-used device will basically kill the audiobook market, and authors should be compensated in some way for the revenue lost there. What's wrong with that?

No. They should not. Society moves on. Those left behind need to ask themselves why. Maybe they were never needed in the first place?

I see no reason AT ALL to ever protect dead markets OR the people who steadfastly insist to keep working in them.

Let them go down with their ship. It's their ship after all. It's their choice.

Re:Let's do a reality check

[Anonymous Coward]

Decent TTS in a widely-used device will basically kill the audiobook market, and authors should be compensated in some way for the revenue lost there.

Why? Nobody has a right to any specific revenue stream. If technology renders your business model obsolete, tough luck.

Re:Let's do a reality check

[geminidomino]

Decent TTS in a widely-used device will basically kill the audiobook market

Spoken like someone who isn't a fan of audiobooks.

When you're buying an audiobook, you're paying for more than just having the book read to you. The reader (well, the GOOD ones, anyway) inject personality into them. You won't get that out of TTS.

Given a choice between the likes of Nigel Planer (Discworld), Patrick Stewart and Kenneth Brannaugh(Chronicles of Narnia) or "Hello, My name is Kit." Yeah, buy the real one.

This is a cash grab, nothing more.

Re:Let's do a reality check

[hansamurai]

Decent TTS in a widely-used device will basically kill the audiobook market

Ahh, no, it will probably not. Part of the bonus of listening to the audio book is the actual human narrator. Until the software can emulate the voices of some of the best readers around, including the actual author of the book, I will still prefer audiobooks when available.

authors should be compensated in some way for the revenue lost there. What's wrong with that?

Are you serious? With that logic, any company that has been put out of business by better technology and services should be compensated for their "lost revenue". Please, not every company needs to try the RIAA tactic when losing customers.

Re:Let's do a reality check

[thermian]

When you're buying an audiobook, you're paying for more than just having the book read to you. The reader (well, the GOOD ones, anyway) inject personality into them.

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.

Re:Let's do a reality check

[langelgjm]

The guy has a perfectly reasonable point. Decent TTS in a widely-used device will basically kill the audiobook market, and authors should be compensated in some way for the revenue lost there.

Why? Copyright holders receive royalties on audiobooks because audiobooks are a derivative work. That makes sense. TTS technology is not a derivative work. It allows you to create a derivative work, but so do a pair of scissors.

You're right, TTS obviates the need for a derivative work, but that is not the same as actually being a derivative work. Copyright law doesn't exist to compensate authors for the fact that there's no longer demand for a derivative work. If they want to take that consideration into account when they set their licensing fees, fine, but honestly I don't even see how copyright law is implicated here.

Re:Let's do a reality check

[DrLang21]

Here's a novel idea. How about the Writer's Guild actually add value to the TTS that they want royalties for. develop TTS technology with invisible tonal inflection tags and phonetic language. It would take a publisher some manual effort to set up and significantly improve the TTS output. Huh, you mean you can actually make money embracing technology?

Where's the loss?

[chill]

While the audio-book business may be a billion dollar industry, how many people buy BOTH the print and audio versions of a book? I'm guessing the answer is "not very many".

When buying an e-book for the Kindle, the author and publishers both get their royalties. With what I am assuming to be a negligible amount of people purchasing BOTH, there really isn't a lot of lost royalty rights from non-e double-dipping. The people that might have a beef are the voice actors that are hired to read for audio books. THEY are in serious danger of being replaced by technology. Well, that's progress. Go commiserate with the slide-rule and buggy whip unions.

Having an artificial voice read an e-book really doesn't cut into any publisher or author profits. Instead of revenues shifting solely from paper books to e-books, there is also some shift from audio books to e-books. But the sum total shifting is still the same.

What it sounds like is the Author's Guild saw dollar signs in the potential to get paid twice for the same thing and doesn't like it that the rest of the world doesn't agree with them, hence the temper tantrum.

what it always boils down to: greed

[v1]

They just want to sell it to you on dead tree, then sell you the bits, then sell you the cassette, (excuse me, DRM-laden WMA files) all of the same work, and charge you each time for it, that's all. What's so wrong with that?

I don't understand his points

[UnknowingFool]

On the National Federation of the Blind's Web site, the guild is accused of arguing that it is illegal for blind people to use âoereaders, either human or machine, to access books that are not available in alternative formats like Braille or audio." . . . In fact, publishers, authors and American copyright laws have long provided for free audio availability to the blind and the guild is all for technologies that expand that availability. (The federation, though, points out that blind readers can't independently use the Kindle 2's visual, on-screen controls.) But that doesn't mean Amazon should be able, without copyright-holders' participation, to pass that service on to everyone.

So his counterpoint to the argument that copyright laws allows the Kindle text-to-speech feature is that blind people can't use the Kindle? It didn't seem that he remotely addressed their point. For though blind people can't independently operate a Kindle, doesn't mean that they can't operate it all. i.e. "Sonny can you load up A Tale of Two Cities and play it for me". Also for those people who are not blind but visually impaired(dsylexic, far-sighted, glaucoma, etc. ), they may be able to operate the Kindle 2. I am not a copyright lawyer but aren't there organizations whose sole purpose is to record books on audiotape royalty-free for blind and visually impaired persons. I don't see how this feature is any different.

Nah, he exempts assistive devices specifically

[krog]

It's us sighted people who are expected to bend over the barrel.

I hope he's comfortable with the fact that he just lost the goodwill of a few hundred thousand geeks (who are among the heaviest readers). Good luck with that, champ.

No - Not at all

[capt.Hij]

I know it is not fashionable to read the article or look at this from a different perspective, but Mr. Blount explicitly brought this issue up in the article. He said that providing such services to sight impaired people is something they have done for a long time and have no desire to end.

He is also not saying that this is a copyright violation. What he explicitly said is that the kindle creates extra value for the work. In return the people who created the material should share in that extra value.

It is fine to disagree with this statement. I personally think that market forces should determine the worth of the product. If you want to argue, though, you should argue against the points that he brought up instead of changing the subject and using a "straw man" argument.

Re:No - Not at all

[NormalVisual]

What he explicitly said is that the kindle creates extra value for the work. In return the people who created the material should share in that extra value.

Why? They played no part and incurred no expense in creating that extra value, and unless the Kindle's speech is being recorded, there's no derivative work being fixed in a tangible medium, which was my understanding of what was required for a copyright claim. I suppose they could stretch and try to call it a "performance", but these guys really need to get a grasp on how greedy it's making the entire content creation industry look to everyone not involved in it.

Re:What an idiot

[arcmay]

I'd argue the Kindle will make more money for authors because of an inability to sell e-books secondhand. If the secondhand book market is larger than the audiobook market, the author's guild is coming out ahead.

In what sense is this a "performance"?

[jeffb (2.718)]

It's a rendering. Good God, are they going to try to charge if we choose to re-render it in a different font size? Are they missing out on millions in revenue by not charging for iTunes music visualizations, which are clearly "performances" of music in a different modality, and surely at least as deserving of copyright protection?

Authors or Book Sellers: Which do you like more?

[sweatyboatman]

Yes, you do not understand his point. Let me help you.

His point is that Amazon.com would like to set this up as "Big Mean Author's Guild vs. Helpless Blind People". When it's really the far more neutral "The Authors Guild vs. Amazon.com".

Now, a kindle owner pays ~$10 to Amazon.com for an e-book, and some of that goes to the copyright holders (e.g. the authors). The Authors Guild's members get far more money for audio books than for e-books. And the distinction between an audio-book and an e-book is blurred by the TTS feature of the Kindle2. (Right now it sounds like a computer, but in five years, TTS may advance enough to make audio books a thing of the past.)

What's the difference to you, the Kindle owner?
Probably nothing. Amazon's price-point probably wont change much either way.

What's the difference to the authors and amazon?
Well if Amazon gets its way, it can make more money off of each e-book sale. If the author's get their way, they can make more money off each e-book sale.

So the question is: Which do you like more? The people that write the books or the people that sell you the books?

My Kindle

[Profane MuthaFucka]

My new Kindle has shipped from Amazon and will arrive any day. I'm planning to read Gutenberg books with it.

If Mr. Blunt is successful in getting Amazon to remove the text to speech feature from my Kindle, will he compensate me for the loss of use of something I paid for?

If prevents my Kindle from reading public domain books to me, then I expect a fucking check for a hundred bucks in my mailbox. Nothing less.

Audio books are worth more than e-books

[goombah99]

I bought the official audio book of 1984 directly from Amazon.com.

This is exactly Blount's point. You were willing to pay money to get an audio version. Audio books are a huge huge huge market (billions of dollars). E-books are a teeny tiny market (millions of dollars).

E-books are sold cheaply. Audio books command a premium because, as you youself noted, they have a value beyond the text that is worth paying for.

Amazon is Paying e-book prices and selling them as audiobooks. Sure they may sound crappy at the moment but this is likely to change.

Blount is just saying that publisher's need to charge kindle's e-book rights at a rate closer to audiobook rates. And if Amazon does not like that then they need to stop offering the audio conversion.

The tricky part of the argument is this. It's not the publishers who are fighting this. They love expanding the e-book market. Indeed the publisher selling the e-book rights might never have bought the audio rights from the author.

It's the writers who are objecting to having their e-books turned into audio books and not getting paid.

Re:Audio books are worth more than e-books

[Sj0]

Sometimes certain elements of the process need to STFU. Sometimes it's publishers, who refuse to sell their DRM-laden content in some countries, but are incensed that people would steal said content to get it after being refused at the gates. Sometimes it's the authors, who want to rape the only future their medium really has by charging 60 bucks for a text file.

Both need to give their heads a shake.

Re:Audio books are worth more than e-books

[goombah99]

There is another way to look at this.

One could say that audio books contain more labor and this is part of why they cost more. Once a technology comes along that removes that labor they should cost less.

That is true, but it misses the point.

Thus the real statement of the quesiton is this: if the manufacturing cost of books and audio books goes down then clearly the price of these should fall. But since audo books and e-books have different roylaty rates, if you change their ratio then you chance the total earnings to the authors. thus you need to re-adjust the roylaty rates so that the authors get the same total earnings.

Why should you want to assure authors get the same as before: when you sum up the total earnings (revenue minus cost of production) for books this get's divided amongst the publishers and authors. There is some dynamic equilibrium of what is neccessary to pay authors to entice a sufficient number of them to produce the books you want. e.g. if authors got no money, there would be fewer books written (not zero of course, but there could be no professional authors at all!)

If you want to argue that authors are paid to much then you have to prove that their is artificial scarcity of authors. good luck!

So in the end there has to be some fixed amount of money flowing to authors to maintain this status quo.

Blout is saying that if you canablaize a high profit audio book sale with a low-profit e-book sale then you simply need to charge more for e-books to make the total for the authors come out the same as before.

it's okay if the overall price declines. indeed this is great since it may increase sales. But in the end you can't simply lower the price by lowering the author's roylaties.

Re:Audio books are worth more than e-books

[shutdown -p now]

"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."

- Robert A. Heinlein, "Life-Line".

Re:Audio books are worth more than e-books

[shutdown -p now]

Now if you read the article you know this is not about stopping you from readin out loud or even reading out loud to another person. Or even a librarian reading to a class. it's about sales of audio books while paying e-book royalty rates.

There are no audiobooks sold for Kindle. What gets sold are plain text books, and the device (not even the book!) is bundled with a text-to-speech reader. It's not the same as audiobooks. This is also in no way a violation of the authors' copyright, or anyone's else - they still get paid in full for the copy of their book. Copyright does not restrict the means of the end user to interpret the text - whether it is simply read, or TTS used to read it aloud, shouldn't be of any concern of the author.

No, this is greed, pure and simple. They could get away with charging extra for audiobooks, and they want to keep doing that; and now Amazon is pulling the rug from under that business model. So there's a lot of noise. But, gladly, Amazon and the customers have full right to just tell them to STFU, and that's what's most likely going to happen.

Re:Audio books are worth more than e-books

[shutdown -p now]

There's a HUGE difference between an audiobook and a TTS. Like comparing a kids stick figure to a masterwork painting.

TTS mispronounces words like crazy, has very poor pacing and no emotional content. Audiobooks often have sound cues and other content to make the presentation much more like someone acting out the book, rather that simply reading it.

It doesn't even matter. If TTS is a perfect replacement for a manually-recorded audiobook, so what? It's not a copyright infringement to use TTS or to distribute it, and the author is still properly compensated for his work (which was scribbling the text, not doing the recording), so morally it's perfectly fine too.

Re:Audio books are worth more than e-books

[langelgjm]

But selling a device with text-to-speech capability isn't the same as selling an audiobook. An audiobook is a derivative work. A device with TTS capability is not a derivative work (well, we'd probably have to have a court case to tell us for sure, but I don't think it is).

Here's my logic: The original copyright holder gets copyright in derivative works. But copyright requires that a work be fixed in a tangible medium of expression. Simply providing TTS doesn't do that. As soon as the output of TTS is saved on a tape or as an MP3 file, then you have a derivative work, but that's not what Amazon is doing with the Kindle.

Re:Audio books are worth more than e-books

[jonbryce]

Am I allowed to hire someone to read the book to me without paying the author any extra money?

I believe I am, so why can't I hire a computer to do the same thing?

Re:Audio books are worth more than e-books

[Arterion]

So if I pay a nanny to read a bedtime story to my kid, I'm violating copyright?

This directly parallels the hulu/boxee story

[Cajun Hell]

Some people are saying that authors deserve to be paid for the audio. They're right. What they're forgetting, though, is that the authors are paid. Amazon paid for the e-book. The author whatever piece of that that they agreed would be fair. (Had they not agreed, all this talk about "copyright infringement" would be a hell of a lot less theoretical and Amazon's lawyers would already be scrambling and asking their client, "You did what?")

It's not Amazon's fault that the writers sell the e-book so cheaply compared to audiobooks, just as it's not hulu's or boxee's fault that the video content providers sell video with a web browser framed around it, more cheaply that the same exact video without the web browser framed around it.

Market segmentation is about fucking with people. Computers transforming the information you bought into a way that is easiest for you to use, is about getting un-fucked.

I vote for the computer.

Re:What an idiot

[EtherMonkey]

Hmmm $8 for a paperback, or $8 for a DVD of a movie, or $24 for a video game that plays 20 books worth of time, or ... Books are way overpriced now. My solution is mostly the same as for music- I just stopped buying them. If they were $4, I would probably buy them.

First of all, please tell me where you live because I'm paying up to $10 for a paperback and a minimum of $15 for a DVD and $50 for a video game.

I have to agree with your solution. As prices have gone up I've cut back on my spending because I generally feel the product isn't worth the cost. The result is that I spend LESS money now on entertainment than I did 20 years ago, not even factoring in inflation.

Remember when movies were $4.50 and you could get popcorn and a soda for $5.00? I used to take my kids to the theater every week. 4 x$ 9.5 x 52 = $1976

Now tickets are $10.50 and popcorn and a soda are another $10+. So now we go to the movies once a month, get a soda and sneak-in our own snacks. 4 x 15.50 x 12 = $744.

Who's the loser? The movie theaters, studios and MPAA. At $62 per movie -- assuming we sneak-in snacks -- I'm a lot more selective about what movies we go see. Honestly, there aren't 12 movies released each year that are worth that much to me. But when it only cost about $30 to take the family to the movies, you didn't mind when the many of the movies were bombs.

Ditto for books. I used to read a book a week when they were under $5. Now I buy maybe 12 books a year at an average price of $9.00 and trade with people at work and in my neighborhood.

And video games. Used to be I'd buy new games the week they were released. But at $80 each for the newest titles that can be finished in a week unless you pay EXTRA for on-line gaming, I've cut down to just a few games a year.

The problem I see with the Entertainment industry is they literally want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to keep on increasing the size of their slice of the pie while selling more pieces of more pies at the same time.

Re:not crazy, auditioning for a job w/ RIAA

[Eil]

Mr. Blunt is NOT ranting. He actually does put forth a good argument that authors should be paid for the audio rights for their books if an audio production is being sold by a third party.

I'm sorry, but I don't buy that argument.

From where I sit, it just sounds like the Author's Guild is pissed that someone invented--or more offensively, sold--a technology that undermines one of their revenue streams. That's life, that's business, that's capitalism. Deal with it. The correct response isn't to bring your sob story to the public and politicians and hope that they pity you enough to prop up your outmoded business model for a few extra years. The correct response is to adjust your way of doing business such that both you and your customers benefit from this new technology.

I guess that's too much to ask for today's businesses?