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Google+Copyright Fight Brewing Over Amazon’s Kindle 2 | Threat Level from Wired.com:
“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.”
But…
Wendy Seltzer, a legal scholar at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, said no rights are being violated. Amazon’s newest gadget, she said, “is enabling another feature to make further lawful uses of that book.”
And…
Michael Kwun, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has an in-depth posting on the EFF’s DeepLinks Blog that he said debunks the guild’s theory. He wrote that the synthesized voice is not a derivative work, as the guild claims, that is “based upon one or more preexisting works which, as a whole, represents an original work of authorship.”
I suspect that the Author’s Guild is incorrect on this as a matter of copyright law. I wonder, though, if perhaps they are speaking in regards to a contract that might exist with Amazon that is more restrictive than copyright generally?
Related articles
- Does the Authors Guild Want to Sue You for Reading Aloud to Your Kids? (EFF)
- New Kindle Audio Feature Causes a Stir (WSJ)
- Kindle 2 ‘violates copyright’ claims Authors Guild (telegraph.co.uk)
- Cory Doctorow Criticizes Authors Guild (mediabistro.com)
- The Kindle, Copyright, and Neil Gaiman (geeknewscentral.com)
- Author’s Guild calls Kindle 2′s text-to-speech software illegal (crunchgear.com)
- Gagging Your Books (prathambooks.org)
I'm currently a graduate student of the history of law and technology at the University of California, San Diego. I also provide law and technology consulting services.
Additionally, I'm a non-practicing lawyer and former developer/sysadmin at a biotech non-profit. For more about me and my work, see 
