Well, I was trying to figure out whether using a text (i.e., the actual letters) to produce something is thought of legally as the same as using a work (i.e., the meaning expressed by the text) to produce something.
I was wondering about this because I was thinking that even if TTS is considered to be producing something,* the manner in which it produces the thing is more like text manipulation–shuffling squiggles around–than it is like the manipulation of an artist’s work. For the TTS software, AFAIK, has no semantic component whatsoever. It simply has rules for how to change letters into sounds, with no reference to the meanings of the words formed by those letters at all.
The distinction beteen text and work is one I make. But I was wondering if the law makes the distinction as well, because if it doesn’t, my argument would be pointless from the get-go.
Anyway, I’m not sure the argument that’s forming in my head has any merit, but I’m just speculating here.
*(notice the hypothetical nature of this claim, btw–further in your post you seemed to attribute to me that this hypothetical actually obtains, but I hold no such view)
Hopefully they will get judges who have enough technical savvy to ask the relevant questions. For example, are e-books distributed by Amazon encoded with the text-to-speech information somehow, or is it some piece of hardware that simply reads text, recognizes words, and produces speech? If it’s the former, I could see Amazon being liable for changing the author’s work in some way and I could understand arguments that they had to pay for this change. If it’s just hardware that could interpret any text, then I think they have a better case.
Another big part of it would be if Amazon e-books work only on the Kindle, or if they will work on any reader. If they work on any reader, then it further proves the distinction that there is no derivative of the work at all, it’s a simple piece of hardware anyone can buy that reads text, just ilke the Narrator on Microsoft Windows. If you happened to have an e-book reader on windows, and used the Narrator to read it (assuming that’s possible) I doubt Microsoft would have to pay royalties on that service. The Kindle is really no different from that.
I too would like to see a response to this. I do not see any substantial difference between a machine that verbalizes text and a machine that enlarges text.
Kindle ebooks are DRM’d so that they not only don’t work on non-Kindle devices, they don’t work on Kindle devices not registered to your account. My understanding is that it’s pretty trivial to strip the DRM rendering the file in one of the standard ebook formats (mobi, or something like that), but that of course violates the DMCA (if you’re in the US, at least, and the Kindle isn’t available elsewhere to my knowledge).
But there’s a Kindle reader available on the iPhone. Could someone write a TTS app that could run along with the Kindle software (I don’t have an iPhone or iPod Touch, so I don’t know the limitations of the applications) and read the text from the Kindle app?