Idiocy. If I can pay a man to read me a book, why can't I pay Amazon (by buying their device) to read me a book. At any rate, Amazon is selling their books and making them money so this is just pointless veniality. Maybe next they should sue to stop the printing of "large print" editions because just buying the book doesn't give you the right to read it with big letters.
@darklighter of course you CAN pay someone to read a book to you, it's just that nobody realistically would. Technically I could pay someone to run me over with a cement truck, even though i wouldn;t.
You CAN pay a man to read you a book. You can't pay a man to read the book, record it, and then profit by selling the recording to other people and expect to be in the free and clear.
You can read a book aloud to your children. You can't tour around reading books to children and charging them a fee for your "show" (without paying an author or publisher).
etc etc...nothing to hard to understand
The Talking Books program for the U.S. Library of Congress is permitted to record books and magazines without author's permission for the Public Library system (a service for the blind and/or physically handicapped) because they use a "specialized format", and I assume, because it is for the library. Not necessarily a protected format, but one that is different than the norm. Presently it is *still* a specialized cassette player that uses regular cassettes, but gets four sides out of what is normally two by using two mono tracks per side. This is the only biz I am familiar with which can tell a protesting author "Yes we can." when it comes to recording and distributing published work.
There is no sale after the conversion. You buy the book and then give it to a man so that he can read it to you and only you. You are not selling the recordings further. The text-to-speech conversion happens after the sale and there is no further sale or distribution after conversion, so copyright should not apply in this case.
Basically it is just like if I buy a CD and then convert that CD to MP3 and listen to them on my iPod. Same here - I buy from Amazon a book in digital text form and convert it (via a feature in the Kindle) to the same book in audio form. It should be perfectly legal under fair use (as long as there is no resale or redistribution of copies).
Seems to me that you could pay a man to read you a book, but he would technically owe royalties to the author for doing that. If he reads it to you for free, he doesn't, but he can't profit from somebody else's work.
So Amazon should pay the authors a bit extra every time they sell a book for the Kindle because they are selling a book *and* an audiobook. Probably not the full audiobook price because it is a much lesser quality one, and it's not guaranteed to be used, and it has the potential to increase sales for the authors, and all that jazz. But I suspect that's what will come out of the court case: Amazon pays royalties (and how much) and probably your costs don't go up much, if at all.
The Triumph proved to be one of the better looking and performing pre-paid handsets we'd had the pleasure of holding in our sweaty mitts, but we had one major hangup: the name.
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Idiocy. If I can pay a man to read me a book, why can't I pay Amazon (by buying their device) to read me a book. At any rate, Amazon is selling their books and making them money so this is just pointless veniality. Maybe next they should sue to stop the printing of "large print" editions because just buying the book doesn't give you the right to read it with big letters.
You CAN'T pay a man to read you a book; that's the whole point here.
@darklighter of course you CAN pay someone to read a book to you, it's just that nobody realistically would. Technically I could pay someone to run me over with a cement truck, even though i wouldn;t.
well, in this economy...
Yes, you can. What you cannot do is pay a man to read you a book then distribute the recordings, or, pay a man to read a book at a public event.
You CAN pay a man to read you a book. You can't pay a man to read the book, record it, and then profit by selling the recording to other people and expect to be in the free and clear.
You can read a book aloud to your children. You can't tour around reading books to children and charging them a fee for your "show" (without paying an author or publisher).
etc etc...nothing to hard to understand
The Talking Books program for the U.S. Library of Congress is permitted to record books and magazines without author's permission for the Public Library system (a service for the blind and/or physically handicapped) because they use a "specialized format", and I assume, because it is for the library. Not necessarily a protected format, but one that is different than the norm. Presently it is *still* a specialized cassette player that uses regular cassettes, but gets four sides out of what is normally two by using two mono tracks per side. This is the only biz I am familiar with which can tell a protesting author "Yes we can." when it comes to recording and distributing published work.
People pay to have other people read books all the time.
RSVI - Reading service for the visually impaired
I bet many, many, many home health aides and home care specialists have spent time reading to patients... And receive pay for the time spent doing it.
There is no sale after the conversion. You buy the book and then give it to a man so that he can read it to you and only you. You are not selling the recordings further. The text-to-speech conversion happens after the sale and there is no further sale or distribution after conversion, so copyright should not apply in this case.
Basically it is just like if I buy a CD and then convert that CD to MP3 and listen to them on my iPod. Same here - I buy from Amazon a book in digital text form and convert it (via a feature in the Kindle) to the same book in audio form. It should be perfectly legal under fair use (as long as there is no resale or redistribution of copies).
Seems to me that you could pay a man to read you a book, but he would technically owe royalties to the author for doing that. If he reads it to you for free, he doesn't, but he can't profit from somebody else's work.
So Amazon should pay the authors a bit extra every time they sell a book for the Kindle because they are selling a book *and* an audiobook. Probably not the full audiobook price because it is a much lesser quality one, and it's not guaranteed to be used, and it has the potential to increase sales for the authors, and all that jazz. But I suspect that's what will come out of the court case: Amazon pays royalties (and how much) and probably your costs don't go up much, if at all.