Authors Guild Continues To Falsely Claim That Reading Aloud On A Kindle Violates Audio Rights
from the which-rights-exactly? dept
Roy Blount Jr. is a funny man. He appears regularly on the radio show Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me..., and is one of their funnier panelists. But, unfortunately, I don't think he was joking when he wrote a silly Op-Ed for the NY Times defending the Authors Guild's stance that having a Kindle use text-to-speech to read aloud is somehow a violation under copyright law. Blount, who's the President of the Guild, seem to be arguing not from a legal perspective, but from a "but this is how we want it to be" perspective. That's because he has almost no legal argument at all. Using text-to-speech to read text you legally own aloud is not copyright infringement. It's not a "fixed" version of the material, and it's not a public performance. So, rather than come up with a legal justification for such a ridiculous claim, Blount resorts to this: "audio books are a billion-dollar market."This is the "but the old way of doing business made us so much money, so any innovation must be illegal" argument. You know what else was a big market at one time? Horse & buggies. And Gramophones. And 8-tracks. But technology made them all obsolete at some point or another, and that wasn't illegal. You don't get to cling to an old business model just because it made you lots of money. Sometimes new technologies come along, and they provide a better experience for people, and the market changes. Already it's a stretch to say that a TTS read-aloud of a book really "competes" with an audio book, but even if it did one day, that doesn't necessarily make it illegal just because Blount and the Authors Guild wishes it were so.
Finally, Blount responds to criticism that the Authors Guild's stance goes against readers for the blind or the ability to read aloud to your kid at night. He basically just says "no, that's not true." But he doesn't explain why. That's because there is no good explanation, based on what the Authors Guild has said concerning "audio rights." Basically, the Authors Guild is trying to pretend copyright says what it wants it to say, rather than what it actually says. And, when people have pointed out examples of how the Authors Guild's interpretation of copyright is bogus, their response is "well, we didn't mean it for that." They are, of course, missing the point. Those examples aren't to show the full impact of what the Authors Guild is claiming. They're to show that the Authors Guild is wrong in what it thinks copyright grants them. For a group of "Authors" they seem to have trouble with basic reading comprehension.
Update: John Paczkowski has a great post on this, comparing Blount's statements to those of John Philip Sousa a century ago, complaining about the introduction of "playing and talking machines" and how they would destroy music.
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Filed Under: audio rights, authors guild, books, copyright, kindle, roy blount jr., text-to-speech
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What this really shows is a distinct tin ear on the part of the writers guild. This is an accessibility feature for vision impaired kindle owners.
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Think of poor Jake Wood!
Audio rights are usually sold to Jake Wood to read with his breathy, manly, voice. Grr!
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So much...
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Re: So much...
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Re: Re: So much...
* favoring or promoting progress; "progressive schools"
* favoring or promoting reform (often by government action)
* (of taxes) adjusted so that the rate increases as the amount of income increases
* fixing prices, fixing laws, and sending anyone who disagrees to jail
* gradually advancing in extent
* a tense of verbs used in describing action that is on-going
* (of a card game or a dance) involving a series of sections for which the participants successively change place or relative position; "progressive euchre"; "progressive tournaments"
* liberal: a person who favors a political philosophy of progress and reform and the protection of civil liberties
* advancing in severity; "progressive paralysis"
See if you can spot which of those definitions didn't really come up on a google search. ;-)
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Amazon's Lawyers Took Care of This
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There are a ton of books out there that I would buy as an audiobook but the publishers have not chosen to hire the voice talent, production, etc.
The authors want to sell the uses of their books piece-by-piece. But the market is going to demand non-complicated solutions to this need for more audiobooks.
Mike, it is also similar in some ways to the rights that people try to sell as movies. If the story is already in public and is about facts, there is no legal requirement that story rights from a dead person's relative need to be sold, transferred, or granted.
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Re:
Yeah, right. Just like MIDI has fully replaced live orchestra recordings, right? No, a simulated voice rendered on-the-fly will NEVER be able to replace a human voice, because it is incapable of the emotion necessary to create the proper intonations. Listen to a good reader, like the late Frank Muller, and you will understand. No computer will ever replace him.
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Re:
Yeah, right. Just like MIDI has fully replaced live orchestra recordings, right? No, a simulated voice rendered on-the-fly will NEVER be able to replace a human voice, because it is incapable of the emotion necessary to create the proper intonations. Listen to a good reader, like the late Frank Muller, and you will understand. No computer will ever replace him.
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Re: Re:
How long it will take to be good enough for most listeners, I have no idea. It could be a long time, maybe 20 years or more; natural language is a difficult problem to solve with the algorithmic computers we have today. So we'll have to either develop far better algorithms (some of which will be enabled by faster and faster processors), or entirely new kinds of computers - neural net, quantum, who knows. But it will happen sooner or later.
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This is just getting ridiculous
She utilizes software that reads text aloud so that students can learn to read. It can help them sound out individual words if needed. It can also read web pages or practically anything on the screen for the blind. I guess she can't use that anymore. So much for her students being able to experience the required reading material because of course those were written by an author and we do not want to infringe on their rights.
She reads aloud to her class from textbooks, novels, etc. and they read aloud to each other as part of group readings. I guess that is out the window now since all those come from authors. So, inorder to teach her students, I will have to create a device that will transfer the knowledge from her brain to her students' via the matrix. Oh but wait, does that constitute a public performance of her knowledge; that would be a violation of her rights. I can't do that either.
Whats a guy to do?
DISCLAIMER--Any reading aloud of this post constitutes a violation of my rights and is subject to litigation.
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Re: This is just getting ridiculous
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Re: Re: This is just getting ridiculous
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Re: This is just getting ridiculous
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Paraphrasing
(And unspoken: "And now A is probably looking into how to sue me for breach of contract. Remember, it was supposed to be an exclusive right!")
Granted, this still doesn't show that copyright law needs to be invoked. The situation would seem to call for a talk between the authors and Amazon about what exactly allowing e-publication means, and perhaps a revaluation of those rights in future contracts.
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Re: Paraphrasing
"Exclusive Rights" deals are what should be made illegal, then all sorts of "intellectual property" issues will disappear.
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copyright violation? with what copy?
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Value added
Even if the kindle text-to-speech was better and didn't speak in an "electronic" sounding voice it still would not be a replacement for an audio book read by a good orator. Then there is the fact that the audio book can be on a CD, or can be converted to MP3 for play on an MP3 player, while the kindle text-to-speech can only be played on the Kindle.
There really is no competition here. The Writer's guild appears to be suffering from cranial-rectal inversion.
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Re: Value added
Unfortunately, if Party A decides to try it, establishing (or disproving) that point will be up to a long, painful court case of the sort which is decided by who runs out of resources first. And that's likely to be the author.
"[...] it still would not be a replacement for an audio book read by a good orator."
For now, sure. But are you certain technology is never going to reach the point where it is a reasonable replacement?
"[...] while the kindle text-to-speech can only be played on the Kindle."
How long do you want to bet that lasts? Even in terms of official Kindle features? (I'm pretty sure someone has their own homebrew system for getting around that already.)
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Sousa's complaint
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speech to text
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Re: speech to text
Companies that don't innovate because they're afraid of taking away sales from another product line tend to get left behind by competitors who have no such hesitation.
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Re: from the which-rights-exactly? dept
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Good chance for a lawsuit
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Kindergarten Cop
A tough cop is given his most difficult assignment, masquerade as a a kindergarten teacher in order to find a copy right infringer.
thanks to IMDB for portions of the above
Sorry Kids, but I can not read to you because the read aloud copy right costs too much.
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These at the Author's Guild see a potential loss of revenue, because some people who might have bought both a paper book and an audio book in the past, may now just buy an e-book, reading it and listening to it via text-to-speech. While they may in fact miss some revenue, that does not justify invoking the audio rights argument. In the Kindle scenario, only one form of the book is being distributed, and that's via text. How the customer chooses to consume the text is the customer's business. The same applies to all text that we have on our computers and devices. I can use TTS to speak any text I have rightful access to. I can also feed the text into a braille display, project it on my wall, and print it out and make a piñata.
On the other hand, if the customer was to record the audio output of the Kindle, or record their own reading of a book, and then distribute that recording to others, that could infringe on the rights of the copyright owner, especially if distributed commercially.
But this is not what the Author's Guild is arguing. Sometimes technology makes the information we purchase more useful. This is one of those cases. The Authors Guild needs to use common sense and realize that they cannot invoke copyright law in this situation. Text-to-speech is not "copying" nor is it distribution.
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Waste of time...
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I disagree with the Authors Guild Here
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Re: I disagree with the Authors Guild Here
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Sometimes the main point is less important
But an underlying point is far more important: copyright law is based on a fundamental misunderstanding, and so its very existence is inherently flawed. Granting a temporary monopoly to artists has not been shown to increase or improve available art in the current era (where leisure time for creating art is abundant, as opposed to previous eras where leisure time for creating art was rare).
You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. The current discussion sounds like everyone has assumed that you can, and is busy arguing about what the stitching should look like.
Then too, there's the much narrower underlying point that invoking the name "Kindle" is promoting and prolongin a ridiculously bad product that needs to take its place on the dustbin of history as soon as possible.
A dedicated electronic text reader would be a marginal product at best. The only thing the Kindle might do better than an ordinary book is redirect a little money to Amazon and its tin-horn Kindle cartel. That's hardly a market-driving innovation.
However, I own thousands of text files (PDFs, CHMs, DOCs, TXTs, etc.) that I might want to read on such a device. Sometimes I want to read on a plane, sitting around in public, or on the toilet, and bringing a laptop to read my files would be cumbersome, and potentially expensive in terms of loss or breakage.
The current version of the Kindle is effectively useless for these purposes. First, it actively discourages you from using your own files. (Though it can be done, with some time and effort.) Second, it is ridiculously expensive. ($399)
This argument about the Authors' Guild is only serving to advertise a piece of technological garbage, and slow the pace at which the marketplace supplies something I can actually use, goddamnit.
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Neil Gaiman's Take
I, for one, agree.
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