What is with it with my fellow writers? Every few months I hear about some new neo-Luddite proposal that makes the stuffed suits at the RIAA look like they’re writing Harry Potter slash to bootleg Metallica MP3s. First it was Pixel-Stained Technopeasants, then it was royalties on used books.
Now the Author’s Guild says that the new Kindle’s text-to-voice feature is infringing on audio rights.
WTF?!? *headdesk*
Apparently reading a text version of a book is a violation of copyright? No. Fail. The “audio rights” are rights you sell to some third party to distribute some audio version. Hey guys, no distribution of audio here. This is the end user using material *they bought* and now we want to go all “no, you can’t use it that way.”
Well, I’m going to start stealing people’s translation rights by running manuscripts through babelfish.
1 Comment
A.R.Yngve · February 15, 2009 at 11:40 am
“Fair Use” applies to reading devices too. If the device can read out loud for you, then by Gum it’s Fair Use. (A very nice feature for visually impaired readers.)
Oh, and readers should pay publishers for storing books in their memories and quoting from memory — so-called “cortex-based piracy”. (Just kidding!)
;-P
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