I Am Awesome » book http://iamawesome.net Pretending the Internet cares about me since 2009. Wed, 28 Dec 2011 21:03:18 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3 Don’t Read That Book Out Loud! http://iamawesome.net/2009/02/dont-read-that-book-out-loud/ http://iamawesome.net/2009/02/dont-read-that-book-out-loud/#comments Thu, 12 Feb 2009 16:26:07 +0000 conigs http://iamawesome.net/?p=172 A few days ago, Amazon announced the new Kindle 21. Now, I won’t go into it much since, honestly, I don’t care to spend over $300 on a device to let me read digital documents (and 10¢ per if you want your own docs). But it does feature an interesting feature for a portable reader: text-to-speech. Unfortunately, the Author’s Guild doesn’t care for it too much:

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.”

It’s not an audio-book. It’s not a recording. It’s not a derivative work. By that same argument, story-time at local libraries is a “derivative under copyright law.” Boing Boing agrees, so does Jon Gruber… and Neil Gaiman, you know, the author; the same person presumably represented by the Author’s Guild.

  1. Sidenote, why the hell does Amazon still insist on using an image for their announcements on the front page? Is it that hard for them to properly format divs and paragraphs?
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