Nor am I aware of whether copyright lawyers now routinely fraction things in a licensing situation so finely that one could deal separately with print, digital text on a screen, and text-to-speech though I assume there’s no reason why the thing couldn’t be diced as fine as this and even finer.Ĭlearly, if I read a book out loud to an audience in return for money, a book to which I don’t have the copyright, I’ve infringed the owner’s right. Oddly, perhaps, I’d never considered whether under Canadian law a book-talking machine would infringe the rights of a copyright holder who had only licensed a digitized print version. (Most commentary you’ll read on this - WSJ, Boing Boing, and those quoted in the DigitalKoans piece - scoffs at the Guild’s claims and to some extent misrepresents them as being clearly opposed, when their only statement on the matter says that they’re studying the thing.) But this ability to speak a book worries the American Authors Guild, which opines that an act of turning text to speech might violate copyright, or, more precisely, impinge on an author’s “e-book rights.” This is, of course, no more than any competent computer can do nowadays, and in tones that are increasingly lifelike. Apart from its other features, the Kindle 2 can read - out loud. As everyone knows by now, Amazon is poised to bring out Kindle 2 in the U.S.

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