When a publisher publishes a book, there is a contract specifying exactly what rights they will be granted for the work, and for how long. That varies from publisher to publisher. Every right must be spelled out exactly, and both parties must agree. So I might choose to grant all digital rights to one publisher, print rights to another publisher, and foreign and audio rights to a third publisher, and that’s my right as an author. In return, I’ll get a cut of the money from each right I grant. So the ebook sales might be 40%, the print might be 7%, and the audio might be 10% of gross profits. If I sign over the digital and audio rights to Publisher A, and they create an ebook, but not an audio book, that’s their right–but nobody else can create an audio book either. And if they do, that’s 10% of royalties I will not receive for my work. It is also illegal.
What Kindle is doing is infringing on that, which in turn, potentially takes money from the author and the publisher. Yes, it is stealing. You might have a really great reason to use the text-to-voice feature, and you might be really excited because now you don’t have to pay for an audiobook when you buy an ebook, but the fact remains, you are getting two products for the price of one, and the authors/publishers’ argument is that Kindle (and Amazon) do not have the legal right to create and sell the audio format. Authors do have the right not to give their work away for free. Even if it really, really makes you mad.
Reading aloud in private is not a public performance even if more than one person is listening to the book being read. It is not a public performance unless the public can attend.
I should also point out that this is false. Anybody can create a recording of your book being read aloud. What they can’t do is distribute that recording. If I legally obtain a copy of your book and sit down with a microphone and a recording device and read it aloud, I am not infringing on your rights in the slightest.
What’s at issue here is whether distributing a text version of a book that is readable by a mechanical reading device is legally equivalent to distributing an audio version of that book. That the Kindle can read only electronic text files and not hard copies is pretty much irrelevant. A device capable of reading hard copies is only one step removed, and OCR isn’t anything different in principle from text-to-speech. It’s just another sort of mechanized format-shifting. This isn’t some scifi hypothetical. My robotic reader is producible with off-the-shelf parts available at your local Staples - the only snag at the moment is that I’d have to destroy the binding of a physical book if I want the pages to autofeed through the scanner.
I have no idea, I am a computer geek, not a lawyer.
lee, if you check the player piano links in my earlier post you’ll notice that there is nothing in the cites regarding public vs. private performance. I am not a lawyer but I’d bet that the issue of private vs. public wasn’t a huge factor in the player piano decision.
Gorsnak, the issue isn’t you using a book in any way you would like in private. The issue is Kindle offering, for free and without paying the author, a version of the book (audio) which the authors presumably want to be paid for. This is, as far as I can tell, exactly like the player piano issue. I’m willing to bet it plays out the same way.
It doesn’t make me mad in the slightest (though apparently the OP doesn’t take kindly to the view that authors might not want to pass their rights over for free). I don’t care–the Kindle 2 isn’t cutting into my bottom line right now. I don’t have any publishers clamoring to turn my books into audio books. But I suppose if you really want to show me, you could go buy every one of my books on Amazon right now and use the text-to-speech feature.
My point is, it’s silly to pretend that authors are being unreasonable because they don’t like it if the Kindle cuts into their audiobook sales. With the Kindle, they only get a cut of the ebook sales, even though you get the benefit of the ebook and the audiobook.
I have no idea if your robotic text reader is inherently illegal. I’m not a lawyer. And there’s a reason all authors should have a lawyer or agent looking over their contracts. I was just explaining why authors aren’t jumping up and down with glee at the notion of an ebook reader essentially creating an audio book, and why publishers don’t like it either. I was a bit alarmed over the threat in the OP–she won’t ever read said book if the author in question does not want to lose money on a sale? I don’t think it’s terribly unreasonable for authors to want to pay their bills and put food on the table. Of course, here on the SDMB, there are usually plenty of people around to argue that it is terribly unreasonable for artists to be paid for the work…
I think money, or trade, has to be involved. Don’t teachers commonly read to students? Where did most of us first hear The Cat In The Hat? Libraries, too. I’ve been to a lot of (free) public readings. I used to frequently see flyers posted for adult readings here in Berkeley. 'Course, we are a bunch of commies.
Peace,
mangeorge
This all seems to me to be a big waste of time.As long as people want text to speech, technology will quickly surpass any ability to disable it. 3rd party apps will start popping up. There is no stopping it, especially since its all based on pretty old technology to begin with.
Now Target may of choose to settle to avoid bad publicity, or some other reason (the risk of a win could have been too costly or something) but apparently there’s a following of people who do believe disabling speech to text functions violates the ADA. At anyrate ANAL.
On a moral argument I’d put fourth the question of why does Amazon and some of it’s authors want to make life harder for the blind?
By taking away the ability of people to use Speech to Text systems they’re essentially saying the blind must pay a premium to enjoy a book like the rest of us. Isn’t being blind bad enough?
A book that is data. Never forget that. Computers crunch data. It’s what they do. There will be a hack to enable speech to text on kindles in a week prolly.
What you’re saying is how someone processes that data for personal use can be theft. That’s just silly.
Say I make a really cool looking building. People come from all over and take pictures of it for their own personal use without compensating me. Are they thieves?
Please give a cite of a law you believe says using a speech to text system, or even making a personal recording of a reading of a book per personal use is illegal.
How about libraries? Are they bastions of thieves too? They’re publicly lending your books so anyone can read them for free.
Uh where did anyone say ebooks should be free?
Well since you want to mischaracterize the opposition as such. I counter:
You want your blind fans to pay a punitive fee for not being sighted.
Is there a blind guy/gal among us we could ask?
We had a deaf guy for a while, can’t remember his name, but I hear he got busted.
I just did a two-year search for “deaf guy”, but got zero.
Anyway, I’ve listened to digital speech, and it ain’t that bad. If you try a little, your imagination can put something like voice and texture to it, just as it does when you read print.
It’s not illegal for the Kindle to read those books aloud; Amazon just agreed not to do it in order to gain the authors’ cooperation. You could invent a book-reading device and have it read all the books perfectly for free; you’d just have to get the authors of those works to agree to your plan. The authors are being unreasonable, though.
I have read your player piano link, and either I’m missing something or the two situations are not much alike.
My synopsis of your link:
Before player pianos, musical copyrights were only of the printed sheet music. There was no copyright of the composition itself (or of audio recordings obviously as those did not yet exist). The courts ruled that the perforated rolls used by player pianos did not constitute copies of the sheet music, and hence were not subject to copyright whatsoever. Congress stepped in and required the player manufacturers to obtain licenses from the copyright holders.
But that’s not what’s happening here. The mechanical reading of the book in this case is being produced from a legitimately licensed copy of the material. The copyright holders are already being compensated.
It’s not that I’m opposed to authors collecting royalties on audio rights for their works or anything. I just don’t see how mechanized reading impinges on audio rights. Audio rights give a publisher the exclusive right to distribute & profit from audio recordings of the work. Mechanical reading is the end user using a technological device to read data in one form and play it back in another. While the existence of mechanical reading technology does devalue audio rights, that’s not the same as infringing on them.* If someone wants audio rights to retain their value, they’ll have to put some effort into making the licensed audio recording a superior product to a mechanized reading (which at this point shouldn’t be too difficult - I have a hard time imagining this text-to-speech function being able to appropriately impart the emotional content of a text).
*Which isn’t to say that the courts won’t rule otherwise. Sadly they never consult me before rendering decisions.
Yes, I realize that Amazon is doing this voluntarily. This is hardly surprising given their relationship with publishers.
But I don’t see why I have to get authors to agree with my plan in order to sell my robotic reader. Let’s suppose it has the dexterity to manually flip pages and read an ordinary printed book. I wouldn’t be selling any content, just the robot. It would take any book that you have (purchased, borrowed, whatever) and read it aloud. You would be responsible for obtaining legitimate copies of whatever it read. I wouldn’t need to obtain any permissions from anyone in order to market my device, nor would my device impinge on anyone’s rights to distribute audio versions of books. Or that is what I am arguing.
That Amazon is the sole vendor of both the Kindle and the files it reads may be confusing the issue here.
The Kindle was never intended to be used by the blind to begin with. It would be like deaf people suing the makers of radios because they can’t use them. The product is simply not meant for their use.
About the Kindle, I remember hearing early on that it was going to cost a couple hundred bucks. That was a month or so ago, when it was first being talked about.
Was I hallucinating again?
The Kindle 2 costs $360. There’s no monthly fee. eBooks cost about $10 each (give or take). Magazine and newspaper subscriptions vary.
One thing to keep in mind: The Kindle 2 is the first mass market device designed to automatically create digitized readings of texts. This is new legal territory here.
Imagine this working in the other direction. Imagine if you bought an audiobook from iTunes and Apple added a button to iTunes that would mail you a free paperback with the push of a button. This would be a departure from the current sales contracts. When a person purchases a paperback, the sale does not automatically include a right to a free audiobook version. Similarly, when you buy an audiobook, you are not automatically entitled to a free paperback. Authors legitimately deserve to be compensated for the creations - even if the creations appear in different media.
Now, copyright law states the creators have the sole right to authorize derivative works or performances of their creations. The legal question here is, does the computer reading of the book constitute a ‘derivative’ work or performance? Some might argue that because it’s a computer reading and not a live person that it doesn’t qualify as a performance. I think though that’s its inescapably a derivative work and such something that’s clearly within the author’s control (and has been all along even before this technological development.)
I think it’s worth remembering that by asserting their right to control derivative works, authors & publishers are referring to the longstanding contracts under which the works were first published. The Kindle’s new technology is creating a whole new market that wasn’t in place when most of the original works were published.
Denying authors their due for the creation of new works via new technology is like Disney denying VCR royalties to Peggy Lee and the others from Lady & the Tramp because VCR’s hadn’t been invented when they signed the original contracts.
As for the disabilities act - that’s a red herring. Authors are under no obligation to provide audio versions of their works (or braille or large print either.) Again, these are derivative works or editions of their text. I can’t imagine that the introduction of the Kindle’s text-to-speech technology will impose an obligation on individual authors to provide derivative works free of charge to the visually impaired (just as authors are not obligated to provide audio or braille versions.)
Now imagine if you played your audiobook into your computer microphone while running a voice recognition program, and printed out the resulting text file.
Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that Amazon will not be distributing any new derivative works. They will distributing a new program that can interpret their existing eBook format but play audio instead of displaying text.
With that in mind, I don’t see how the authors have a legal leg to stand on. If Amazon is only distributing their eBook format as per existing agreements, then what violation have they committed? The eBook audio player certainly isn’t a derivative work of any particular eBook. And while the act of using the player to read a particular eBook does create a derivative work, that derivative work is not being distributed so there’s no violation.
Doesn’t matter. Target.com wasn’t meant for the blind either but it was sued. I expect kindle Text to Speech blocking authors, or maybe Amazon to get sued as well.
The software exists on the kindle to make it blind accessible with reasonable accommodation.
