Kindle Copyright Woes, Take 2
For those of you who haven’t been following the Kindle 2 copyright problems, essentially publishers (and authors?) have been complaining about the text to speech feature of the new Kindle. Their claim is that including a text to speech engine is a violation of their rights as copyright holders under § 106 of the Copyright Act. From what I gather, their argument is that the audio reading could be a derivative work.
While there seems to be some good fair use arguments — in particular, it should be pointed out that text to speech software can in no way compare to a real dramatic reading — Amazon has disappointed me by backing down from the feature. In its new form, publishers will be able to elect whether or not their a book will be available to the Kindle text to speech feature. Better than nothing, I suppose.
You make me sad, Amazon.
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[...] Even though Amazon recently updated their Kindle ebook reader to support users adding PDF files, the Kindle’s generativity score (this might be a new blog all by itself) would be very low due to its lack of open standards. Amazon has run into issues due to remotely crippling installed ebooks due to copyright and DRM. [...]
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