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

Disabilities

[Anonymous Coward]

Is he seriously suggesting that a blind person who has legally purchased copyrighted text should have to pay extra to process that text into a usable format?

In the words of the Author's Guild President

[MasterOfMagic]

"Fuck you if you're blind. Now bend over and take it."

You'd think he would be happy about this as it increases the reach of written works to a group of people that couldn't previously use them - the illiterate. 80% of the world's population is literate, according to the UN, meaning they can write and read in one language. Therefore, 20% of the world's population, about 1,340,000,000 people, can't read.

I thought the RIAA strategy of alienating customers through lawsuits was bad. Here's the president of a guild saying that 1.34 billion new potential customers aren't important to him.

Re:Audio books are worth more than e-books

[horza]

Simple. because one is being sold and the other isn't. You might as well ask, why can't I do the following.

1) buy one copy of the print version.
2) record an actor reading it
3) sell as many copies of the recording as I please and not pay the author a dime.

That's totally bogus. According to your logic, why can't I do the following:
1) buy one copy of the print version
3) sell as many copies as I please and not pay the author a dime

The answer to both is you can but it's illegal. If there is no actor reading it then I don't see where the added value of the audio version is. The TTS is simply a different output device to an ebook reader, the material for which a license has already been paid.

A counter-argument to yours is that if a separate license is needed for a TTS version of copyrighted text, this means deaf people will need to pay for a separate license for every web page that has copyright on it.

Phillip.