Author's Guild Says Kindle's Text-To-Speech Software Illegal 683
Mike writes "The Author's Guild claims that the new Kindle's text-to-speech software is illegal, stating that 'They don't have the right to read a book out loud,' said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. 'That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.' Forget for a moment that text-to-speech doesn't copy an existing work. And forget the odd notion that the artificial enunciation of plain text is equivalent to a person's nuanced and emotive reading. The Guild's claim is that even to read out loud is a production akin to an illegal copy, or a public performance."
To hell with them! (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously though, despite this being a rediculous idea, what is the Authors' Guild actually trying to do here?
I mean, if anybody is really pushing to create more copyright holder rights, it's Amazon and the Kindle. Let's review...
-The right to not let my friends borrow my book when I'm finished reading it? Check.
-The right to not resell my book on the used books market when I'm done? Check.
-The right to having access to my books revoked on a whim if my provider goes out of business, or *gasp* decides it's not a profitable market (MSN Music, I'm looking at you)? Check.
With all these rights landgrabs that Amazon is making with their digital books on Amazon (and heck, digital media in general), I'd assumed they were colluding with the Author's Guild. I mean, if nobody can share your books, and nobody can help spread the buzz surrounding your great ideas or fiction... that means you'll make more sales... right?
To hell with all of them. I'll read quietly, or out loud when ever I please. And just for being assholes, I'm going to pirate the next book published by a guild author. And I'm going to listen to Microsoft Sam read it to me. And I'm going to pretend to like it.
Hogwash (Score:5, Interesting)
Sometimes I read a portion of a book out loud - to myself - in order to slow down my thought processes. It is akin, I think, to taking notes when being lectured. The act of reading out loud alters both the rate and the quality of my understanding of the text.
Which, according to Paul Aiken, means I'm a criminal.
Speaking as the owner of one of the oldest SF-specialized literary agencies in the country, and as someone who is quite interested in protecting author's rights for all the obvious reasons, I think Aiken has fallen off the cognitive cliff, and that he does no one - not authors, not consumers, not publishers - any favors by pushing this over-the-top interpretation of what an "audio performance" is.
Re:To hell with them! (Score:5, Interesting)
What is the purpose of the "read out loud" right? Because reading out loud would be an interpretation and infringe on the art? What about a monotone voice, like text to speech?
What happens, however when the tech gets so good that it can read with emotion.. better yet, mimick the voice of any person we choose? Do the rules then change?
Re:To hell with them! (Score:5, Interesting)
Make more money for the Authors' Guild. This has absolutely nothing to do with authors, writers, publishers, editors, or anyone who reads books. This is solely the money-grabbing greed of Paul Aiken and his cronies. If I were an employee of the guild I would be so ashamed of Aiken's comments I'd resign. This man, despite his apparent position representing authors, is actually against people enjoying books.
Re:To hell with them! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:To hell with them! (Score:1, Interesting)
Perhaps the Author's Guild is worried about sales of audio books being injured by the Kindle (and likely other text-to-speech e-book readers).
Maybe authors get higher royalties for audio books, and they are worried that authors will lose some of the potential higher earnings.
IANAA (I am not an author).
"controlling legal authority" for that opinion? (Score:3, Interesting)
In the immortal words of Al Gore: Do they have a "controlling legal authority" for that interpretation of copyright law, or is this just a legal posture, that is not supported by law or precedent?
dave
Right to read? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wow, kicking blind people. A new low (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was in high school, the director of our AV department waged a protracted battle with me over my making enlarged copies of sheet music in the orchestra. Never mind that this was a matter of vision accessability. Never mind that the school had allocated me a legitimately-purchased original, just as they did for each other student. Never mind that academic fair use would have been squarely in play even if the above hadn't been true, and certainly never mind that the law specifically forbade the reasoning behind his theory as to why fair use shouldn't apply.
I probably should've sued the district, but that's not how I roll.
My point, though, is this: There are indeed a subset of the population that believe content authors should have the right to profit from the fact that some customers have differing needs in how they can view said content. "You can't buy the regular edition and adapt it to your needs; you have to buy the special high-priced usable-by-you edition (if we bother to make one)".
Re:To hell with them! (Score:5, Interesting)
IANAL, but I'd imagine the purpose of the read out loud right is to protect playwrights from having people perform their plays without permission or compensation. In that context, it makes sense. In the context of a text to speech computer intended for personal use, it makes no sense.
Sure, if someone starts hooking their Kindle up to a PA system and staging public performances of an electronic reading of someone's book, I could see an issue. However, the device itself having the ability to read text back is not in itself any kind of violation. Computers have had text to speech in some form for decades, and I'm sure they've been used to "speak" copyrighted works plenty of times in the past.
The Author's Guild is cutting off its nose to spite its face here.
My kids will be *pissed* (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:To hell with them! (Score:5, Interesting)
You have no idea.
When looking for schoolbooks for the severely dyslexic little brother of a friend we tried looking for audio books. Turned out there was an organisation which used to deal with that here. Notice "was".
For schoolbooks which had no audio book available from the publisher they'd got teachers who volunteered to record audio books for blind students.
Guess what the publishers thought of that.
Now they aren't allowed hand out recordings to blind students and the publishers aren't interested in making or distributing any since the market is so small.
As far as rights holders are concerned the disabled can go fuck themselves.
Re:To hell with them! (Score:5, Interesting)
So should someone sue the guild, for not being accessible for the blind? Most blind books are not released for ages after the original. The read out loud feature could be seen as an accessibility tool, like the screen reader in XP.
Re:Not what it looks like (Score:3, Interesting)
Seeing as they haven't done a damn thing about any other text reader, I think they can safely go fuck themselves. Amazon is not making audio recordings of books, the user is invoking a program to convert text to speech and pointing it at a text they bought from Amazon.
Now if Amazon was selling the audio recording of the Kindle reading the book, then they would have a case.
Re:I have a suggestion (Score:5, Interesting)
Or more appropriately, Dracula. Out of copyright and freely available as an e-book.
Just play the Free audio book [librivox.org].
Re:To hell with them! (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sure some scumbag will figure out how the ADA applies to this. That is, if it hasn't been done already and is just waiting for someone with deep enough pockets to trip over it.
Re:To hell with them! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:To hell with them! (Score:4, Interesting)
In the digital age, copyright is all about contracts.
When Amazon sells you a hardcopy book, they don't need any permission to copy the book because they don't create the copy. When they sell you a Kindle book, they create the copy themselves, so they need a contract that grants them that right.
Re:Wow, kicking blind people. A new low (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:To hell with them! (Score:3, Interesting)
To take this one step further, what about when teachers read aloud to their classes, or story time at the library?! Are these activities suddenly illegal now?
Not to mention that the Kindle can read all sorts of formats so who is to say that I am not loading PDFs from work and having the Kindle read them to me while I am driving? The Kindle isn't JUST for reading Author's Guild books.. sheesh. You'd think they invented the written word or something.
Not actually the closest example. (Score:2, Interesting)
The closest example, actually, is if you were very good at reading books out loud, and you rented out a theatre, advertised that you were going to read Harry Potter books, sold tickets, and had complete strangers pay to come in to listen to you reading them. The copyright holders would be quite within their rights to ask you to stop, because you've set up a textbook public performance of their work.
Note that the question isn't whether people who are in possessions of a book infringe the copyright by reading it out loud. The question is whether Amazon infringes the copyrights by selling both the e-books and a machine that reads them out loud. It's not quite the same as the textbook case shown above of a public performance of the work, but neither is it the same as privately reading a book out loud; the argument would go that there is no theater hall, but other than that, Amazon is "selling tickets" to the public to have Amazon read the work out loud to you.
So there is possibly a real question here as to where the line between public performance and fair use lies.
PS note that the argument is all about whether Amazon, which is the seller, is infringing the copyrights on the works that it sells. Contrary to what the bulk of the comments to this story assume, whether the buyers or people downstream from them infringe the books doesn't seem to be the problem here; if you have a copy of a book and you read it out loud to yourself, to your children or your friends, you're clear; these are not public performances of the work.
Re:To hell with them! (Score:4, Interesting)
LOL! Reading aloud breaks encryption? I love life right now.
Wait. It gets better.
Since that means that a person uses their brain to "decrypt" the content, then a human brain could be considered an illegal circumvention device. Would proof of illiteracy be enough to get charges dropped? Will they simply put up prison walls around the entire country?
Oh, wait...they're already doing that. Walls in data and communications. Walls in ideas and music. Walls in personal rights and equal protection under the law. Walls between your right to property you own and governments' right to take it away and give it to someone with more money.
[sarcasm]
But, what the hey? As long as there's cable TV who's going to make that much fuss about all that stuff those nerds and geeks go on about.
[/sarcasm]
Between the dumbing-down of the population along with the desensitization to political corruption that have both been happening for many decades, I'm afraid the majority of people don't know, don't care, and don't want to know or care.
On top of all that, they're too busy trying to cope and help their families cope with living and paying bills when they have less and less coming in, jobs getting scarce, prices going up, and government taking an ever-larger bite from their wages.
Strat
Love/Hate of freedom (Score:2, Interesting)
America is full of people who hate freedom. They claim to love freedom. They pay lip service to freedom until they are blue in the face. And to some extent they *do* love freedom...so long as only they have it.
What they hate is when other people (specifically, their customers) have freedom. They want to have tremendous control over those who might be their customers. They want to control every aspect of what these people do, so they can ensure that they extract every single cent they possibly can from their offerings.
They don't want people to be free to use a competitor's products, let alone to make any un-paid-for use of their own products. And, to this end, they must take control of pretty much everything such people do.
So they dress up this control in false language. They say that they are now "free" to earn a living off of a creative work. They mask all of their efforts at slavery by dressing them up as if they were a form of freedom unto themselves. But the truth is obvious. They are attempting to use the legal system (and, in many cases, technological options) to prevent "the masses" from being able to do what they want to do.
As an aside, some of the more pragmatic ones stop talking about freedom and instead try to make the case that if they cannot have absolute control then they will not be able to make any profit at all from their offerings, and hence there will be no offerings. The world will fall into an empty pit of cultural deprivation. A moment's reflection reveals the falsity of this sentiment...as well as reflection upon history or plain common sense. But to those of unclear mind this argument seems compelling enough...and the innocents wind up being indoctrinated against freedom.
The end result is that those of us who truly do love freedom have to fight for it...every day....until we die. The day we stop fighting is the day we lose it all.
Re:To hell with them! (Score:3, Interesting)
There's been a lot of improvement in TtS out of university research in the past ten years. I don't think its unfair to say that given a profit motive there'd be even more investment in the field, to improve things like inflection. Check out some of the IBM samples [ibm.com] under expressive samples.
Re:You're missing the point. (Score:2, Interesting)
Does Apple's agreement with the music labels spell out that Apple's customers are allowed to burn, for their personal use, CDs of the music they buy from the iTunes Store? This could easily be a case where there is an explicit agreement that Apple's customers are allowed to do that.
I don't know the terms of Apple's agreements with the record labels, but basically, I think your argument there isn't bulletproof; it could be the case that Apple secured that ability for iTunes users by negotiating with the labels, and not on the grounds you think.
I think the challenge here is that the Kindle e-book is in a proprietary format that's specific to the Kindle device. The print copy of the tabloid and the OCR software were not specifically designed with each other in mind. This is one reason why the grocery store seller doesn't need an ebook license to sell print copies of the tabloid; even if the grocery store (somehow) sells both the print copies of the tabloid and the OCR software, since these two products are in no way tailored specifically toward each other, the store can't be held responsible for whether the buyers use them together in a way that infringes the tabloid publisher's copyrights.
E-books for Kindle, on the other hand, are not designed to be usable without the Kindle device and/or whatever other software Amazon provides. Amazon can't as easily claim that what the e-book buyers do is the sole responsibility of said buyers, because Amazon itself is the agent making it possible for their device, which comprises a proprietary e-book reader and a proprietarily formatted e-book (or so will the argument state it), to perform a spoken interpretation of the work, which falls outside the scope of the license that was given to Amazon to publish the e-book editions of the books in question (again, so will go the argument).
There's one big unknown in this whole situation, that's not being talked about: what are the precise terms of Amazon's license agreement with the book publishers? A lot of the outcome of cases like this may well turn on that.
Re:To hell with them! (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's say I write software that takes an audio file and spits out a text file containing the words spoken in the audio file. It can be used for a multitude of tasks - transcriptions of recordings of lecture sessions in schools, for example. Is it illegal to use it to take a legally purchased audiobook and spit out a text version of the book? What if I'm deaf? If it is, should my product be banned entirely because it might be used for illegal purposes, despite having legitimate uses? Does this sound at all familiar?
In Amazon's case, this is even more complicated. They sell both DRM-laden and DRM-free books. They simply advertise text-to-speech as a convenience feature. Should they be forced to remove a useful feature from their product because it *might* be used to do something that *might* be an infringement of copyright for *some* of the books sold on the kindle? (I say "might" because the legitimacy of their claim is dubious, and I'm sure Amazon has the same viewpoint at the moment. Or do you really believe they were unaware of the potential legal issues involved with the feature?)
There's a bigger question here. Why should authors get to decide the feature set of the product they sell their ebooks on? They should be allowed to decide whether or not to sell their ebooks on the Kindle, and nothing more.
To make a clearer analogy, if Amazon wants to advertise a printer for the Kindle, there is no reason they shouldn't - nobody would argue that a PC's printer driver constitutes a copyright infringement device because it might be used to print out a DRM-laden PDF, and the hypothetical Kindle printer is no different. (We're arguing about changing formats, right? Amazon sells both print and electronic versions of these books. It's essentially the same situation.)
Basically, I think that if authors don't like the feature, they shouldn't sell on the Kindle, end of story.
Is burning books illegal too? (Score:3, Interesting)
(from the don't-give-them-any-ideas dept.)
Is burning books illegal too? After all, that could be considered a political statement on the original work, one that is so deeply founded in the content of the work that it could be pretty much considered a derivative work of its own: Certainly, one could not make such statement if one would not have read the original text (or at least deeply pondered its cultural significance - as we all know, certain people criticise things they just heard about).
What is the Author's Guild going to do to stop that particular flagrant and deeply offensive misuse of author's rights?
</sarcasm>