Authors Guild Kindle 2 Proclamation (while we’re at it, how about a rewrite of the copyright law?)
Here we go again. As you may have noticed, a few days ago, representatives from the Authors Guild said that the text-to-speech feature to-be-released on the new Kindle 2 is illegal.
“They don’t have the right to read a book out loud,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. “That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.”
The statement left may lawyers, law professors, and common-sense advocates scratching their heads. Check out Sherwin Siy’s excellent post on the topic. He questions the Guild’s strange approach to the position saying, “if I were looking for infringements under every bed, and cast my eye upon the Kindle’s text-to-speech, my first thought would have been to attack it for making a public performance of a literary work.” But, as Sherwin explains, for infringement to be found here, the performance must be public, not normally something we’d associate with creepy electronic bedtime reading.
Instead, the Authors Guild brings the strange derivative work argument. But Siy says that just because there’s now audio spilling out of the ebook reader, “doing so doesn’t make something new—the words are the same, the language is the same—there’s only one work at issue, and that’s the original.” He goes on to say that the simple reproduction of the words into an audio format also doesn’t fall under the things protected by copyright law–”it’s not a derivative work because it’s not a “work.” For there to be a work at issue, something has to have been fixed in a tangible medium.”
As I read Mike Masnick’s report of how the Authors Guild is continuing to shove its foot deeper into its mouth, I couldn’t help but think that whether the Guild’s babbling PR team really gave this any serious thought. But, as the piece perfectly identifies at the end of the post, we all know what copyright aggregators like the Authors Guild do when they’re called out by legal experts–they release the lobbyists to legislate around the problem. Says Masnick, “It seems that the Authors Guild is making up a new right (watch out, now the lobbyists will try to get it added): the “you can’t do anything innovative unless you pay extra” right.”
Let’s hope not. For once, let’s have common sense rule the day.
