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Know Your Rights: Does the Kindle 2's text-to-speech infringe authors' copyrights?
Know Your Rights is Engadget's technology law series, written by our own totally punk ex-copyright attorney Nilay Patel. In it we'll try to answer some fundamental tech-law questions to help you stay out of trouble in this brave new world. Disclaimer: this isn't legal advice, but it is best read aloud by a text to speech app. Hey, so does the Kindle 2's Read to Me text-to-speech feature really infringe on authors' copyrights? It's nice to be back! It's been a while. Yeah yeah. Get to it. Okay, so the issue is that the Kindle 2's Read to Me feature obviously threatens the audiobook market, and while at first blush it seems like the Authors Guild has a pretty weak case when executive director Paul Aiken says things like "They don't have the right to read a book out loud," it's not necessarily as ridiculous as it seems.
