Besides, no one in their right mind is particularly excited about text to speech. It’s an intellectual exercise at this point.

Now that we can agree on, Nathan. :)

You bring up a lot of good points, but I think where we differ is where the line is drawn on personal use. The Author’s Guild isn’t suggesting that we make text to speech technology illegal or that we start restricting private uses. I think the thorny issue arises when e-books and text to speech are essentially bundled for sale and used as a promotional device to sell e-Readers and make money without the approval of the author. I don’t think Amazon has the right to profit off of an automated reading of an author’s work.

Now, I know it gets murky from there when you start extrapolating out (what about text to speech wands? What about text to speech on computers?), which is why the lines will eventually be decided by people with far more legal expertise than I possess. But still — authors are going to have to take a stand when their work is used for profit as the market continues to be fragmented by new technology.

I’m not much concerned with what happened to the RIAA, who had the misfortune of standing in front of a wave of new technology that was so exciting and groundbreaking that it promptly made even honest people lose their minds and forget all ethics whatsoever. The Internet has matured, and I think consumers are more willing to do the right thing by content providers. Besides, no one in their right mind is particularly excited about text to speech. It’s an intellectual exercise at this point.

I’m not sure why this is inspiring such snark.

I have zero tolerance for snark, Nathan. (I’m looking forward to David Denby’s new book more than anything else coming out soon.) This is simply honest criticism from somebody more well-acquainted with both the DMCA and copyright law than perhaps I’d care to be.

What if, hypothetically, technology came along that allow for a pretty decent automated cartoon based on the descriptions in the book. Should authors then cede their film rights too because the technology is neat and consumers want it for free (because everyone wants things free)?

Authors wouldn’t need to cede their film rights. They can keep ‘em, and sell the rights to turn their works into films to the highest bidder. But if I want to write a computer program that animates books that I have legally purchased the text to, that’s nobody’s business but mine. If I want to sell that program, that is also nobody’s business but mine. (But if I wanted to distribute that resulting animation, that’s the point at which it’s very much the author’s business.) Copyright law permits me to do whatever I want with that text for my own use, and there’s not a single thing that a publisher or an author can do about that.

Authors come off as Luddites here. If they believe what they’re saying, then they’re trying to prevent their own replacement by a superior, cheaper, more efficient technology. If a computer can read a book as well as a human, then clearly there’s no longer a need for humans to read them. If software can turn the text of a book into a cartoon, then there’s no need for filmmakers. Now, I suspect that you and I both know that these things are not going to happen in the foreseeable future. But pretending that they are, authors trying to stop this is like trying to stop the tide.

Remember when TV networks were upset about the PVR, specifically TiVo? They argued that it’s illegal to fast-forward through commercials, that they’re not giving people the right to watch shows later, but only live, when originally broadcast. That was dumb. They were wrong. We have the right to shift broadcasts in both time (watching them later) and space (watching them on a different TV or a different medium). Likewise, we have the right to shift text in time (reading whenever we want) and space (reading on a different device or via a different medium). One cannot both believe that the use of a PVR is permissible and that the Authors Guild’s position is defensible. As with networks saying that people recording shows to watch later hindered networks’ ability to sell copies of those shows, the Authors Guild’s opposition to computers reading things out loud is similarly foolish.

Again—and I can’t emphasize this enough—the Authors Guild can be as upset as they want to be, but they have no legal ability to enforce such a restriction. Centuries of case law and hundreds of pages of U.S. copyright law don’t contain a single prohibition on this, while the Fair Use doctrine makes very clear that this is totally permissible.

The only way for authors and publishers to get around this is to license DRM-encumbered electronic texts only to the manufacturers of locked-down devices, manufacturers who contractually agree that their devices will not permit any use of the text other than that which is explicitly spelled out in that contract. Then—and only then—can text-to-speech (or text-to-movie) prohibitions come into play. If I were to write a program that got around the device’s limitations, its manufacturer (say, Amazon) could serve me with a cease and desist order for violating the DMCA’s circumvention restriction, and I would be in the wrong, legally, even if I wasn’t distributing that circumvention software to others. That sort of end-to-end restriction is difficult to put into place, and tough to enforce, and would lead the Authors Guild to enjoy the popularity of the RIAA, as Jacob explains.

Short of that, the Authors Guild is just pissing into the wind.

I’m not sure why this is inspiring such snark. All the Authors Guild and we as concerned agents are trying to do is stand up for authors in a fracturing media environment. Text to speech is a derivative right that Amazon is profiting off of on the backs of author’s content. You may think it’s silly, but the technology is only going to improve, and unless a stand is taken now, a precedent is set that anyone may produce a mechanized recording that is bundled with content, and authors have ceded the ground.

What if, hypothetically, technology came along that allow for a pretty decent automated cartoon based on the descriptions in the book. Should authors then cede their film rights too because the technology is neat and consumers want it for free (because everyone wants things free)?

No one is after your interpretive dances, although I’m sure they’re better than text to speech.

Until they find somebody using the Kindle to provide a public performance of a book—at which point they should simply request an appropriate royalty payment—they don’t have a leg to stand on.

And to anybody who thinks that the Authors Guild is right, I’ve got a caveat for this blog comment: Nobody may quote it at any length, read it more than once, or read it out loud. And Fair Use doesn’t apply, for reasons that I can’t actually explain. If you do these things anyway, then you’re a criminal. I can’t see any reason why that should be objectionable.

Actually, that’s not the Author’s Guild position. They’re only opposing text-to-speech on an e-Reader.

From the NY Times Op-Ed:

“The guild is also accused of wanting to profiteer off family bedtime rituals. A lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation sarcastically warned that “parents everywhere should be on the lookout for legal papers haling them into court for reading to their kids.”

For the record: no, the Authors Guild does not expect royalties from anybody doing non-commercial performances of “Goodnight Moon.” If parents want to send their children off to bed with the voice of Kindle 2, however, it’s another matter.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/opinion/25blount.html