Comments on: Adding Value = Theft!

By: Jens Alfke

Jens Alfke — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 19:40:29 +0000

Eric — Heh! Actually I make that ‘==’ joke a lot, and decided that this time I’d give it a rest.

Or maybe it was just a Pascal flashback…

By: Eric Zylstra

Eric Zylstra — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 19:29:12 +0000

Can’t help it…
…but the assignment in the title is driving me crazy.

How about, “Adding Value == Theft”?

Maybe I need to learn another family of languages?

By: Jens Alfke

Jens Alfke — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 15:29:08 +0000

alastair — There’s definitely confusion. What’s bothersome is that, in today’s climate, it gets expressed as an assertion of property rights.

The root of the problem seems to be a confusion between a right to make reproductions of a work (creating and selling an audio-book) versus the right of the end-user to transform the work for personal use (text-to-speech); coupled with a confusion between the end-user’s actions and a company’s creation of a device which enables those actions.

By: Jens Alfke

Jens Alfke — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 15:23:26 +0000

Josh— Yup, I agree completely; I just didn’t bring up that angle because it’s orthogonal to the copyright issue. Although I have to say the speech quality is really good: my office-mate got his K2 yesterday, and tried out the speech feature while I wasn’t paying attention, and I thought for a minute that he’d turned on a news-radio station.

(But having a book read by an emotionless anchorman/woman is clearly not the same as a good audio-book!)

By: alastair

alastair — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 11:39:44 +0000

I think the confusion comes because authors and publishers are used to being able to license audio books separately. I can certainly understand why they’re concerned about the ability of Kindle to read a book out loud, but realistically I think they have to accept that this isn’t the same thing as an audio book (for one thing, as good as modern speech synthesis is, it still can’t match the dulcet tones of the average voice artist).

Anyway, I think the comment from Roy Blount shows really that there has been a misunderstanding somewhere, and I think the subsequent furore that seems to have been kicked up all over the Internet is equally overblown in the other direction. In particular, the Internet hype surrounding this issue is damaging to all copyright owners, not just authors and publishers, and I think it needs to stop. At the same time, somebody clearly needs to sit down with the Authors’ Guild and actually talk to them about this. Perhaps that’s happening right now—we can only hope.

By: Mark Allerton

Mark Allerton — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 06:46:10 +0000

I wonder if they plan to charge extra for children’s books that will be read to them by their parents?

By: josh susser

josh susser — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 05:25:41 +0000

Personal use is a pretty important point. But I think it’s all a stupid issue anyway. I love the recordings I have of Roger Zelazny reading his own works. I can’t imagine I’d be as satisfied with a text-to-speech rendition, or that having that would stop me from buying the audiobook.

By: Jens Alfke

Jens Alfke — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 01:03:12 +0000

Josh — Performance is a different matter than personal use. If someone used a Kindle to read a book out loud to an audience, I’d definitely agree that was infringing. But the guild’s complaint is about the ability to read it out loud even to yourself.

Moreover, they’re going after Amazon, not the user. This is like Woody Allen suing Canon because someone recorded the play with a camcorder.

By: josh susser

josh susser — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:12:54 +0000

I love your examples, but allow me to play the role of Solicitor for Asmodeus. If a piece of content is licensed for rendition in a particular medium, also presenting it in a different medium would be a violation of that license. If I pay the royalty to be able to perform Woody Allen’s classic play “God” in a theatrical production, then I couldn’t also produce and distribute a movie of the performance. However, I’d think that providing interpreters for the Deaf in the theater would be fair, and along the lines of your examples. I haven’t read Blount’s piece and don’t have enough background in the matter to know if this is an issue with licensing terms or some other douchebaggery.