Copyright Fight Brewing Over Amazon's Kindle 2

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 (tele​graph​.co​.uk)
• Cory Doctorow Criticizes Authors Guild (medi​a​bistro​.com)
• The Kindle, Copyright, and Neil Gaiman (geeknews​cen​tral​.com)
• Author’s Guild calls Kindle 2’s text-​​to-​​speech soft­ware ille­gal (crunchgear​.com)
• Gagging Your Books (pratham​books​.org)