Paul Aitken, the group’s executive director objects to the text-to-speech feature on Amazon’s Kindle 2 digital-book reader. Aitken told The Wall Street Journal: “They don’t have the right to read a book out loud. That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.”
“They” (whoever ‘they” are) aren’t reading a book. A machine (i.e., not a moral actor, but a tool) is reading a book. If it’s my tool, it’s reading it for me. It’s funny that, to the best of my knowledge, people haven’t thrown fits over readers for the blind. But doesn’t adaptive technology such as this do exactly what the Kindle does? Doesn’t it equally violate copyright? Do the handicapped get to violate laws that the rest of us do not? What if I’m a bad reader and move my lips while I’m reading? And this is the Writer’s Guild, not the the Screen Actor’s Guild or Equity or whoever represents voice talent in books-on-CD. Sandoval is right; if this is IP crime, then parents have been committing it for centuries.
Meanwhile, the Brits have decided that living musicians need to be protected from competition from dead ones, and are upping their protection of sound recordings to 95 years.
Posted by jeffreyquick 