Paul Aiken, the Executive Director of the Authors Guild has been reported to say “They don’t have the right to read a book out loud,” and that “That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.” These are quotes from a WSJ report yesterday, by GEOFFREY A. FOWLER and JEFFREY A. TRACHTENBERG in response to the release of the Amazon Kindle 2.
You have to be kidding me. The implication is that every speech enabled device for those who have poor eyesight, must license the reading of text in a robotic voice with little to no inflection or feeling. I know of a couple of schools that would be very upset about such comments, the Maryland School for the Deaf is just one. Enabling software and hardware shouldn’t require a license, especially when it is the text-to-speech system that has been around for the last 15 years, if not longer. Perhaps Mr. Aiken didn’t realize the relatively unsophisticated manner in which the Kindle 2 speaks, or that the audiobooks that people purchase are not spoken by R2D2.