Authors Guild President Wants To End Royalty-Free TTS On Kindle 539
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 own one (Score:5, Informative)
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).
Ludite? (Score:1, Informative)
Hate to break the news, but performances of copyright works are protected by copyright as derivative works, which would include spoken word, unless the author gives a license. He seems to have some grasp of that, are you saying you are more knowledgeable about the statute? If so, please correct him.
Re:Where's the loss? (Score:3, Informative)
I do. I've purchased about a dozen books in both electronic or dead tree and audio formats.
I usually get the audio ones first, then buy the text-based one if I really enjoyed the audio book (for re-reading).
Re:Seems reasonable. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Advocacy organizations (Score:5, Informative)
You're right that the Authors Guild relies on members. Which is precisely why, if you disagree with the statements of the Guild, you should put pressure on authors, either by boycotting any author who is a member of the Guild, or writing to them and asking them to signal their disapproval.
When the Authors Guild says these kinds of ridiculous things (and uses logic which, incidentally, implies that people with disabilities should not be allowed to convert media to a form they can use), it makes all members look like greedy idiots. Authors should speak up and tell the Guild that they do not want to be represented as such.
For a partial list of Guild members, see:
http://www.authorsguild.org/news/member_websites/a.html [authorsguild.org]
Contacting the Guild and mentioning that you plan to boycott authors associated with them might also get the message across.
Re:Is it THAT good? (Score:3, Informative)
Section 101 of Chapter 1 of Title 17 of the US Code reads:
According to that definition, how is hiring someone to read a book to me a public performance?
Re:Audio books are worth more than e-books (Score:3, Informative)
Simple. because one is being sold and the other isn't. You might as well ask, why can't I do the following.
1) buy one copy of the print version.
2) record an actor reading it
3) sell as many copies of the recording as I please and not pay the author a dime.
furthermore to tighten the analogy, instead do this.
4) for every audio-version I sell, I buy one copy of the paper or e-book edition.
that way the author is getting the e-book roylaty rate and I'm pocketing the audio book rate.
But (3) isn't what's going on. The device shifts the content from text to speech. The buyer of the e-book doesn't have the right to distribute either the text or a recording of the TTS version. But the creation of the TTS version is certainly fair use. I can now buy a dead-tree book and record myself reading it. I can't sell the recording, but I can listen to it.
I could also cut up the book and turn it into a paper mache unicorn. Are you suggesting that I have to pay different royalties to the author based on my intent to create said unicorn?
Re:Advocacy organizations (Score:2, Informative)
Well, with the actor's guild, the minimum wage is due to the fact that there are literally tens of thousands of lower-end actors competing for the same roles. Some of them very hungry, some of them rather delusional that the next role will be their big break. Thus if there wasn't a acting minimum wage given for a non-extra role, and a slightly higher one for a speaking role, (This is called 'scale'.), actors would underbid each other down to state minimum wage. Or, hell, for free.
Talking about 'reasonable' is not relevant. Guilds and unions are not 'reasonable', they are groups of people in the same industry who work together to force their employers to do something. It's certainly reasonable for them.
In industries where there are identically jobs requires essentially the same skill and same work, it makes sense to set the wage per-job and per-experience and all sorts of things via unions.
In industries where that is not true, a guild does a lot less, but it still does things like protecting people starting out in the industry. Screen actors got ripped off badly by studios for the first 60 years of their existence. There are reruns on TV Land that people still watch that the actors don't make a penny from. (Neither do the writer, or the director, or anyone except the studio.)
I don't know how much the various actors guilds actually require actors get paid in residues now, but what they don't require, they offer actors information about what 'fair' deals are, and even write or at least examine and approve standard contracts. (Simply educating people to take a percentage of the gross instead of the net helps a lot.)
Photographers don't have a useful guild not because it wouldn't make sense for them, but because not enough of them work for organizations with a bunch of photographers. Many of them aren't working for anyone at all...they're contractual hires by random people.
And I'm not aware of any guild that operates the way you think a photography guild would operate, by setting a minimum price on sold goods.
In fact, that would probably be a violation of anti-trust laws. Unions are exempt when negotiating wages, not prices. A bunch of small business owners who work for themselves, can't negotiating price fixing, and make it legal by calling it a 'union'.