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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 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.
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?
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.
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.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
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!
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!
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.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
"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".
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?