It may well be true that there is a lot of income which they would receive if only the text-to-speech functionality had not existed. But do they have a moral claim to that money simply because they were once in a position to consider it potentially theirs? We do not, for example, generally punish the action of giving a book poor reviews, even though this too robs an author of potential income.
What ethical imperative do we have to legally prop up a business model which would otherwise be made obsolete by technology (in this case, ubiquitous access to text-to-speech software)? Especially in the face of the counter-imperative that people should generally be granted as much freedom as possible.
Working it out is fine. Prohibiting it is wasting the technology. So far it looks like more of the latter.
We can shut down all radio stations or work out a payment arrangement for content. We can make VCRs illegal or take advantage of the technology to sell tapes. We can make all plays illegal to present or we can pay the authors and actors. We can drive MP3s underground or sell songs for a reasonable price and pay royalties. That’s the difference I see.
ETA: If the author’s Guild is fighting this, it reminds me of the Musician’s Union fighting audio recording in the 1930s-50’s. Didn’t work then, either. But when they learned to embrace it, they found that recording was a big source of income for musicians instead of the loss they feared.
I agree with this, ascenray. I also think that following the ASCAP/BMI model is a whole lot better for everyone than the RIAA plan of trying to build impregnable DRM wrappers for the etexts and suing individuals who try to circumvent it.
Musicat: it’s only been a couple weeks. The real world moves slower than the technological world but it eventually catches up. Of course by then, we all have android conjoined twins reading aloud for us but c’est la guerre.
I think you thought I was talking about what I would do with Kindle’s TTS. To be clear, I was talking about what I do with it. I set it to play TTS on whatever book I’m reading whenever I get in my car. And it works fine.
Took a few minute’s getting used to at first, but that’s all.
It does precisely one of the main things I’d want out of audiobook. It lets me “read” when my hands are otherwise occupied.
To clarify something again, I’m not saying Kindle’s TTS is just as good as an audiobook for all plausible purposes. Rather, I’m saying it’s just as good as an audiobook for one purpose, and that purpose would be my main purpose in getting an audiobook. It follows that authors have probably lost money due to my having bought a Kindle, since I probably would eventually have bought an audiobook or two or three otherwise. As it is, I’m pretty sure I won’t.
I’m not everybody, but I’m one person, and like I said, if there’s one of me, there are probably thousands of me out there.
Good point. So I should clarify that my argument isn’t “Kindle TTS reduces authors’ incomes, and so shouldn’t be allowed,” but rather, “People in this thread have dismissed the idea that Kindle TTS reduces authors’ incomes–by referring, among other things, to the way that TTS can not come close to approaching the artistry and faithfulness of a professional reading–and I don’t think the idea can be so easily dismissed.”
If that summary requires any ahem editing of my first post, then consider the post so edited.
I don’t really know how the law works, but my impression is first you have to show whether your rights were infringed, then you have to show what the damages were. I think a lot of people in this thread are doubting that Kindle TTS causes any damages. I was arguing that it does. That doesn’t address the question whether Kindle TTS infringes anyone’s rights, though. A book review clearly doesn’t, but right now it’s not clear to me whether Kindle TTS does. It depends on whether it constitutes a performance of the work, I guess.
I suppose if I read a short story out of a literary journal out loud to a crowd of people, that’d be a performance and the holder of the story’s rights would be due some kind of compensation. (Am I right about that?)
What if I set a Kindle to TTS the story in a room full of attentive listeners? Would that be a performance? If so, though, who’d be the performer? Me or Amazon?
Here’s a section from my contract with my publisher:
That’s for the Electronic Book rights; there are totally separate rights for “Electronic Version” and Audio. A taste of some of the Audio language:
So, as you can see,
(1) the lawyers spell out EVERY sub-right; I feel certain my next contract will include specific language regarding machine-read audio versions of the work
(2) there are different royalty rates and different rights for every version AND DELIVERY METHOD, with very specific language for each right re: what’s allowed and what’s not
From my standpoint, the Kindle flap is largely a contract issue; rights have been specified in detail in my contracts, and they need to be honored. If a new delivery method comes into existence that is not covered, then new language needs to be put into contracts, royalty rates negotiated, and a suitable party granted the permission to exploit that format (who says I want it to be Amazon? Maybe I want Apple to have the exclusive right to that format).
Someone who has been granted the right to distribute a text in visual form is not automatically granted the right to distribute the text in audio form, whether read by a single person, a machine, or a full cast of voice actors. Furthermore, all e-book rights are not the same; in my contracts, “Electronic Book” rights specifically disallow audio or any form of visual animation; some of those features fall under “Electronic Version” rights, which I could sell to a different party than the “Electronic Book” party.
In other words, it’s very complicated, the contracts are very specific, and Amazon (IMO) was overreaching by exploiting rights it did not explicitly hold.
You, I’d think. How is this materially different than if you were to hire a person to read the work?
In fact, that’s my problem with the notion that the Kindle somehow infringes copyright. Today, I can buy a book, and ask my friend to read it to me without anyone objecting, right? But somehow it becomes illegal if I employ a machine to do the same task?
I’ve no beef with authors negotiating terms for the distribution of their works, as long as they don’t run afoul of anti-trust issues, but the idea that employing an automated reader somehow infringes rights to which authors should be entitled seems wrongheaded.
The difference is that they are not selling a printed text that you can hire someone to read. They are selling a digital file and a device that decodes it to create works. If they specifically create the work in a way that the device that they also sell can, by design, create both audio and text renditions of, then they are selling both … or …
Perhaps the best way to look at it is that are selling neither a print nor an audio edition of the work: they are selling a digital file of the work. If that digital file is going to be used in ways other than to produce a text version of the work, a way that has the long term potential to cut into other business of the publisher, then the publisher may not want to make the title available on Kindle or in that form. Amazon isn’t fighting this for many reasons but probably this most of all. They want as many titles available on Kindle as possible. The business model demands it. They will work with publishers to come up with a model that works for them - perhaps having an option to buy the file with the capacity enabled for a nominal additional fee for some books and included at no charge by publisher consent on others.
Amazon is not distributing an audio version of anything. Amazon is distributing text versions of written works. Amazon is also selling a tool which can read text aloud. Such tools are commonly available - I found and installed a free TTS program on my computer in about 2 minutes. (It sucks, btw, but the sample voice you can pay for seemed passable.) The existence of such tools means that any electronic text version of anything can be automagically converted into an audio version. That does not mean that the text version is an audio version.
There is no such thing as a text version that cannot be automatically converted to speech. If you can read it, then so can a machine. Even written works distributed in print form on paper can be scanned, OCR’d, and fed through TTS software. DRM is meaningless, since you can take the graphic output and OCR that. If the ebooks sold by Amazon “include” an audio version, then so do the dead tree books sold by Amazon. The only difference is how much effort is involved in the transformation.
It is perfectly reasonable for contracts to be renegotiated in light of the existence of TTS, and even in light of this new ease of use. It is not reasonable to start claiming that text versions are audio versions just because it’s possible to automatically convert one version to another.
I can’t speak to other authors’ contracts (you see how this gets so complicated? We ALL have different contracts, with different rights assigned to different parties using different language), but my e-book rights do not grant Amazon the right to sell a “text version” of the book, whatever that means. The language is not so vague as to merely sell electronically-encoded text that can be decoded in whatever form is desired by the end user. Instead, the rights are restricted solely to selling the work in a “visual form for reading.” Period. If Amazon cannot abide by those rules (or convince authors to negotiate specific exceptions for computer audio), then they likely will not get books from authors/publishers with contracts like mine.
You say that like it’s nothing, but it’s a huge point. The reason e-readers like the Kindle exist is FOR CONVENIENCE. Convenience is a real market force, and can’t be shrugged away. There’s a reason why music publishers never gave a crap about mixtapes in the 80s but pissed their pants over mp3s. Convenience makes these sorts of rights violations easier. The number of people willing to “make” their own audiobooks using a scanner, OCR software, and TTS is vanishingly small. With a Kindle—or some ebook that can be read on a PC—it’s easy.
As a creator, why should I make it easier for someone to acquire rights I have not sold them? It may be impossible to stop such things entirely, but I don’t have to play along with a system that makes it push-button-simple. If it’s not economically advantageous to me, I simply won’t sell my e-books through Amazon; I’ll wait until someone comes along with adequate protections, instead (or compensates me specifically for computer audio).
I think authors and publishers needs to evolve with the technology or find themselves increasingly on the side against the general public. It seems to me a lot like the RIAA’s fight against peer-to-peer file sharing services. Sure, they may have won a few battles here and there, and sued the makers of Napster to go legal, but there are tons of file-sharing services out there that have skirted around legal objections to become ubiquitous and prevalent. And for what? A few thousand in legal fees from a 13 year old? The general disgust and wrath of music lovers? The RIAA should have tried to work with new technology like Apple did with iTunes instead of attacking their fan base
As technology becomes cheaper, there will soon be digital versions of almost all books, and I would bet good money that cheaper versions of TTS devices will become widely available and able to read any electronic text. Authors and publishers need to take that reality into mind and adapt, not raise objections in hopes that people want to keep lugging around physical versions of their books forever. They should quickly draw up new contracts to reflect the fact that electronic versions of their works will now automatically include compensation for audio, or else allow that industry to fade away forever
But note that it didn’t work. Amazon called their bluff.
You make a good point, though, and I’ll revise my claim. It was not stupid or short-sighted to argue this case (except insofar as the publicity has not been kind). However, any publisher that chooses to turn off the text-to-speech feature for their content is treading a dangerous path. Making your product worse to try to convince people to pay for it is a losing battle in this age.
I also disagree that they are ought to receive royalties. Distributing a general-purpose tool that can create audio from printed words is fundamentally different than distributing an audio version of a given work. Allowing content producers to capture the surplus created by innovative new technologies is a terrible idea.
The matter is by no means over. The whole issue of digital infringement is going to be an ongoing story for some time now.
The outrage and posturing of early adopters is rarely the dispositive factor. The first wave of Kindle 2 buyers don’t have as much power as they think they do.
The public does often settle for lower quality or functionality. It happens all the time. Look at cell phones. U.S. consumers have accepted a much lower quality of service than consumers in Europe and Asia get.
Copyrights is a property right. Just because infringement is easier doesn’t mean you get to do it for free.
There are two ways to save text in electronic format - you can either use some sort of text file, or you can use graphics (images of the text). The Kindle .azw format is apparently a modified version of html - an extremely simple marked-up text format. There may be a DRM wrapper to prevent anything beyond display on a Kindle, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a text file. Amazon is most assuredly selling your book as a text file.
Yes. That’s why the Author’s Guild wanted Amazon to stop this. Trust me—authors are perfectly willing to sell new versions of their works; we pray to god that we can! We just don’t like someone selling those versions without first negotiating the rights and royalties with us.
Yes, but that text file can only be used for the purpose of displaying a “visual form [of the work] for reading.” Using that text file for any other purpose would be outside the bounds of the contract.
handy had a long history of just answering questions with whatever came to mind. Most of it was bullshit-and in the case of medical questions, a lot of it could be dangerous. He was warned about it time and time again, and finally he was banned.
Do a search on his user name, or PM me-rather than hijack the rest of this thread.
The end user isn’t party to your contract, and I think you’ll find that reading an ebook aloud, mechanically or otherwise, will fall under fair use. You will note that Amazon is allowing authors to restrict TTS not because of legal issues, but for pragmatic business reasons. Amazon’s lawyers have pretty clearly advised them that the TTS feature isn’t infringing on any audio rights. From their statement:
As was stated earlier, I think the fact that Amazon is selling both the content and the hardware is confusing the issue.
Let’s say the Kindle Inc is spun off from the Amazon mothership and sells only the Kindle hardware device. And Amazon itself continues to sell the ebook content. Who does the author sue now? Amazon is fulfilling its contractual obligations by selling an electronic, visual representation of the work. Kindle Inc has no contract with the author–it’s merely selling a device that verbalizes a visual representation of a book, no different then the user reading aloud the same visual representation.
When separated thus, I do not see how any laws or contracts are being violated.
