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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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This nicely illustrates a subtle trap that copyright law has fallen into. By being a 'bundle of rights' it has encouraged an approach of ever finer division of intellectual works and their uses. An infinite series of new markets to be exploited - that's the legacy of the 'long tail.' I look forward to serving our new 'reading on saturday morning in bed' licence-owning overlords!
Does this mean screen readers are copyright violation machines? Damn those freeloading blind people!
The ______ Agenda
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.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
I got my Kindle 2.0 from the UPS driver yesterday.
I tried out this frightful technology and I can tell you - it sounds very much like Stephen Hawking reading to me.
If by "replace humans" he means Stephen Hawking doing book readings at the local Borders well then, yes, maybe he's right.
On the _other_ hand, I'd like my books read to me... "Once more, with feeling" (you dirty grubs).
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
Is reading a bed time story to its children copyright infringement? This world is really crazy.
Votator.com implements a fair voting scheme (free
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?
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.
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.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
How many of those illiterate people do you think can afford a Kindle?
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 work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
FUCK OFF!
<after basic filter>
{beeep} OFF!
<after christian fundamentalist filter>
you poor misunderstood darling.
<after DRM filter>
go get em tiger - filthy pirates oughta be hung...
<after *AA filter>
let's do lunch.
<after /. filter>
first post!
It seems to me that equating the output of a text-to-speech process to the product of a human reading the text as an audiobook debases the value of the people who provide the voices of so many audiobooks. Now, granted, at least some of the people who read for audiobooks are volunteers helping our libraries, but there are also audiobooks that are read by professional talent. Consequently, this claim equates professional actors, or professional voice actors, with a bit of technology. Shouldn't the actors' union get involved in this fight?
P. Orin Zack
- - -
I write pointed political and business short stories at http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/
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.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
You and your fellow Author's Guild members (and the RIAA) need stop thinking of 20 years in the past. You also ought to look at what copyright law says, and stop trying to nickle and dime everyone to death.
Licenses are for publishers, not end users. I don't licence a book, I buy a copy.
If I buy a paper book I can do any damned thing I want with it, including reading it aloud or putting it on a scanner and letting the scanner read it aloud.
Luddite cave men like you are the reason the major record labels and newspaper chains are going under. Adapt or die. Want my advice? Do everyone a favor and die, you are hindering freedom AND progress.
Free Martian Whores!
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
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.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Copyright law, Chapter 6, Section 121 expressly allows for alternative versions to exist specifically for persons with disabilities. Also in the case of an audio book, you are paying for both the copy of the work and the voice actor's performance. In the case of the Kindle 2, the customer has already paid for the book.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
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?
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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?
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
Everybody wants their slice of the pie. They all poke their finger in to get "their fair share". What they fail to realize is that no one wants a slice of pie that has lots of finger holes. People will just find another pie that looks and tastes good.
For the metaphorically challenged...
They are ruining their medium by demanding we pay for something that is common sense. Their stories aren't great enough for people to want to pay twice for them (once for the text version, once for the text to speach license).
Being unreasonable with your customers used to mean you went out of business. Perhaps someone should remind this guy there is a recession going on and people are more likely to take their dollars elsewhere.
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.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Anyone who believes that TTS can replace a fully-produced audiobook has never listened to one.
It is ludicrous to think that a computer program could ever mimic the creativity and skill required to evoke emotion from a listener. Most of the audiobooks I have listened to are not simply reading text. Their voices change in speed, volume, timbre, syncopation, and pronunciation.
Take a listen (legally, of course) to Jim Dale's interpretation of the trial of Barty Crouch, Jr. in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. See how you're feeling after the first three discs of World War Z, performed by a full cast, including Alan Alda, John Turturro, Rob Reiner, Mark Hamill, and The Mighty Henry Rollins. Or, if you're particularly interested in destroying any notion that a computer could ever infringe upon the experience of listening to an excellent audiobook, try Rob Inglis's masterful confrontation between Gandalf and Saruman after the last charge of the Ents in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Then you'll understand how much of an idiot the above AC and Roy Blunt, Jr. really are.
Irrelevant. It doesn't matter how good the voice is. If I have the right to hire someone to read a book to me (and I do), then I have the right to hire someone to make a device that reads the book to me.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
healthy unions are as vital to our economy as healthy companies.
No. Without a healthy union, companies still have to contend with labor supply and demand. If they abuse their employees, the more competent employees will flee to other jobs. Without healthy companies, we don't have an efficient way to coordinate large amounts of workers, so we lose a lot of economies of scale.
To make matters worse, there seems to be a reverse correlation between the health of the union and that of the company.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
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.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Decent TTS in a widely-used device will basically kill the audiobook market, and authors should be compensated in some way...
This is only true if you assume that there are people out there who would buy both the eBook AND the audio book if there was no TTS. Otherwise eBook sales aren't causing a loss of sales in the audio book market, they are merely replacing those sales.
I own a few books as audio books (usually bought before a long drive somewhere), and even in the cases of the really good ones, I've never felt a burning desire to buy the book again in print.
E-books sell for less than half to a quarter of audio book CD prices and fewer copies are sold. the ratio is enormous-- the Audio book market is 1000 times larger than the e-book market.
hence replacing 1-for-1 an audiobook with an e-book would cut the income by 1/2 or 1/4. Moreover if the author reads his own book, then his roylaties are even higher so the loss is maginified further.
you might wonder why then a publisher would be willing to sell if it represents a loss of revenue. The answer is that the e-book publisher and the audio book publisher are not the same person. the audio book publisher might be horrified that his sales are canialized by cheap e-baook sales, but from the e-book publisher's point of view it's a chance to expand their market 100 fold.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
A well-done audio book will have emotion, nuances, voice changes, etc. Talking Text will be serviceable, but not especially interesting.
In my town we have a group of experienced voice-readers who periodically perform reading books or plays in front of paying audiences. That effect is between a book and fully-staged play. Your imagination supplies the visual details. You can more easily concentrate on the words. You hear emotion and see it in the voice-reader's faces.
Perhaps talking text will evolve in the future. I anticipate a "voice-markup" annotation that might suggest emotion, tone, gender, etc. to the reading computer. Music and screenplays do such now. In the distance future an A.I. reading computer will be able to figure these out.
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.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Section 101 of Chapter 1 of Title 17 of the US Code reads:
According to that definition, how is hiring someone to read a book to me a public performance?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
So the question is: Which do you like more? The people that write the books or the people that sell you the books?
Neither, I prefer decisions to be made with a tiny bit of common sense. The fact we are even having this debate is hilarious.
If the author's guild isn't interested in what the end-user does, then they have no business talking about this. Amazon is selling text. At no point are they selling audio files. They happen to sell a device that will render text into sound, but as with my mp3 example, it's just a case of taking a format designed to reproduce audio and doing just that.
If Microsoft sold the end-user a device to convert text into speech, would Amazon be forced to pay for audio book rights? If some company built a device that would scan a page, convert it to text, then convert the text to speech, would paper publishers be forced to pay for audio book rights?
It's madness. Amazon is only selling text. They aren't selling audio books. What the end-user does with that text, even with an Amazon provided device, is their problem, not Amazon's.
It's been a long time.
You're talking about two different things.
To me, this is more like a publisher demanding a rental store pay full box price for full distribution rights for every xbox game rental because an end-user might have a hacked xbox and could pirate the game.
Amazon is selling text, not audio. The fact that the end user can take a device, even one made by amazon, and turn it into audio is irrelevant. Under that theory, every paper publisher should have to pay for audio book rights because all it takes is a scanner and some patience to turn a paper book into an audio book.
It's been a long time.