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.
Kindle Text-To-Speech Now Up To Visually Un-Impaired CEOs, Not People Who Need It
A few weeks ago, whoever the fuck the Authors Guild is proved they’re just another association filled with complete idiots unable to comprehend adapting their business model to current realities. Unfortunately, their threats to shift their industry’s revenue stream to the lawsuit market have caused Amazon to cripple the Kindle 2′s text-to-speech abilities. Now, instead of allowing the Kindle 2 to read anything aloud to visually impaired users, children, or anyone else who might need or want such a thing, this option will be up to the book publishers.
Let’s think realistically about this for a second. Amazon hasn’t removed the feature entirely, so as long as a publisher allows it, their book can certainly be read aloud in a robotic, monotone voice. Still with me on this realism thing? Okay, now tell me how many publishers are likely to do this? To be fair, we don’t know. But looking at precedents set by the digitization of music and movies, I’m guessing the number of publishers allowing that will be less than or equal to the number of independent, smaller publishers selling Kindle books through Amazon.
I really hope, though, that I’m wrong. I hope, to the bottom of my heart, that the publishing industry has about as much respect for the Authors Guild as, well, any author I’ve ever met. I would be so happy if publishers prove me wrong and universally offer the text-to-speech option, because they know that negative reinforcement doesn’t make a customer want to buy another “license” from you. But I am not at all optimistic.
I should note that my argument about the visually impaired doesn’t seem to jive with the Guild; they state in their “rights alert” thingy that “Kindle 2 isn’t designed for such use” by people with bad vision or blindness. I could question who the hell the Authors Guild is to question how useful something is for visually impaired people, but I think the National Federation for the Blind can do that better than me.
But oh well. Looks like there’s nothing we can do but fire up our BitTorrent clients in protest.