Slashdot Mirror
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.)
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.
So I guess you agree then that the GNU copyleft is unenforcable?
That is once I have the source code I should be able to do whatever I please with it. Say use in in my own software and sell that without releasing the source.
Right? I'm just intepreting the text.
Okay so maybe it's because I'm getting paid for my software that bothers you.
Well instead I'll just give the new closed-source software away for free. But unfortunately it only runs on one device, a Gindle, that I sell for $300.
I'm not selling the code. I'm giving the binary "interpretation" of the GNU source away for free.
Look the TTS is a selling point of the Kindle. Amazon is selling the audio version when it sells you the kindle, not when it sells you the e-book. But either way amazon still made a profit off the audio.