Monthly Archive for February, 2009

CrunchGear just brought to my attention a recent WSJ article about how the Author’s Guild is making a frivolous attempt at making people realize that they exist. Oh, and something about how Amazon’s recently announced second-generation Kindle is infringing on copyrights because of its text-to-speech technology.

The Guild’s executive director, Paul Aiken, says that “They [Amazon] don’t have the right to read a book out loud. That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.” In other words, if you purchase a copy of a book, in printed or electronic form, then under no circumstances may anyone or anything utter a single one of the words in it, be it your teacher, your mother, or your own mouth if you happen to unconsciously mutter the words to yourself like zillions of people do. Now, the Kindle doesn’t even go so far as to use accurate vocal inflections like any of those three would do, as no text-to-speech technology is that good. But nonetheless, it’s still a derivative work.

I wasn’t aware of this, but now that the Author’s Guild has informed the public about it, I think it’s time we crack down on this sort of illegal behavior. I need to track down my kindergarten teacher and have her ass arrested — she illegally, without license or permission from the publisher, performed the copyrighted text of Where The Wild Things Are for an entire class of 20 children; I’d be surprised if she wasn’t continuing such criminal behavior to this day. And to think my own father, on more than 40 occasions between 1993 and 1996, committed the same offense with Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel.

And let us not forget that every day, people who have impaired or no vision use this same illegal text-to-speech technology to browse the Internet, with entire copyrighted newspaper articles being infringed upon for an automatically-generated performance. If those sons of bitches can’t read the text, they should buy the damn audio version that trained actors worked so hard to produce, am I right?

So, yes, the new Kindle’s text-to-speech technology is illegal, and clearly not a fair use of copyrighted material because its robotic and monotone performances of the text will have a very real and tangible impact on the sales of audiobooks sold by Amazon’s Audible service. Screw blind people, old people, and children who can’t read yet, we need to stop Amazon from stealing from themselves.

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• Quick! Tell Everyone!