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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.)
According to the Authors Guild logic, if I read aloud a book to my 4 y.o. son, I should pay another license.
Nah, just kidding. I don't have a son.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
I don't get why I cant use the content I have purchased for personal use in any way I want to so long as I use it personally or among my small group of friends, just as I might read a book to my son at bed time (or is that illegal now ?).
I get that there should be an extra payment (and have made such license payments) if I want to display a DVD publicly, because a bunch of other people might not buy the movie if they can just go see it projected by me.
I have yet to see why Kindle reading a book takes bread from the mouths of authors and I don't see why celebrity audio-book readers should feel that they have any god-given monopoly on reading books aloud.
Nullius in verba
Try reading the article before you judge. After reading I am more suspect that these posts are being put up by those who are more pro-Amazon looking for a sympathetic crowd.
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.
There ALREADY are legal exceptions for the blind to produce and distribute free audio versions of texts, and btw the kindle uses on-screen controls that no blind person could operate in order to access the audio functions, currently.
Amazon is indeed advertising these products as an audio book(the rights of which are worth far more currently than the rights for an e-book) and an e-book in one w/o paying for the rights to sell an audio book.
The audio functions of the books are coming closer to human levels and are being marketed and sold as such.
Remember while copyright laws have been abused and in many cases are abusive and extreme in their extent; still, for every exec and RIAA stooge getting paid hand over fist there are ten creative writers and authors who make an honest living using those laws as well.
Fight the abuse and the abusers, not the people who are using Copyright as it was intended, which still despite what you might hear is the vast majority of copyright users and creative workers.