Amazon’s new Kindle reader can read back a book to you out loud in a computer voice. On hearing that, Paul Aiken, who heads the Authors Guild, said, “They don’t have the right to read a book out loud — that’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.”
Which of course sounded ridiculous!
But as Engadget’s Nilay Patel points out in a Q&A with himself, figuring out who’s right is hard:
Are you seriously saying that I don’t have the right to read a book out loud? Girl, you crazy.
No, you absolutely have the right to read a book out loud — but you’re not allowed to make recordings of yourself and sell them. That’s something only authors are allowed to do, and it’s hard to have a problem with that. You’d be pretty miffed if someone started selling recorded versions of your blog without compensating you, wouldn’t you?
But the Kindle isn’t playing back recordings — it’s synthesizing sounds based on the words in the book! Isn’t that just a private reading?
Sure, and a MIDI piano isn’t playing back song recordings, it’s just playing notes from a file that sound exactly like the sound recording, right?
This is actually pretty tough stuff — as far as edge cases go, this one pushes right up against the boundaries of the current law. On one hand, you definitely have the right to read books that you own out loud using whatever tools you want, and on the other, authors definitely have the right to prevent others from selling audio versions of their works. The Kindle’s text-to-speech feature blurs the lines between books and recordings, and that means those two rights are in conflict with each other.
