Hacker News Reader

Comment by witten | Hacker News Reader

I'm sympathetic to the plight of the starving (or even well-fed) writer wanting to get paid for their work. But the opinion espoused in this piece is the classic argument that just because an industry has grown accustomed to a particular revenue stream or business model, they should therefore always and forever have the privilege of keeping it. And anyone who introduces products or technology to prevent that or cut into their revenue is not playing fair, morally questionable, and/or should have to compensate them for lost revenue.

It's a ridiculous argument.

View on HN

This is not his argument.

Separate revenue streams for audio books is not just a quaint custom in the publishing world, but a consequence of copyright law, which treats text and audio rights as properties that may be licensed separately. He's arguing that his constituents' property is being taken from them without their consent. I think his case is weak, but it's not dumb.

There isn't an 'audio right' in copyright law. The author is trying to justify the loss of an established contractual norm for a sold derivative work (a professionally produced reading) by expanding the notion of copyright. The author is confusing contract rights with copyright. http://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/scope.html

But Amazon is neither selling nor giving away audio books. They are giving away a general text-to-speech solution which may conveniently be used on a book. Arguing that this is violating copyrights is the same thing as saying that text-to-speech is inherently illegal.

I wonder how things would change if the text-to-speech were done server-side? I'd imagine one can get significantly better quality if you're not doing text-to-speech on the 400Mhz processor on the Kindle 2.

The issue there is the bandwidth required for streaming audio. This is a device set up for batch downloads and not much else -- when you add time-sensitive network requirements like this, you make customers unhappy.

Also, what if you're using it as a "book on tape" in the car, on a road trip through the middle of nowhere? You lose network connection, you lose your book on tape.

tldr: I think it would be better quality, when you could get it, but at some level reliability is more important for this application.

I think his case is weak, but it's not dumb.

I don't understand what the Author's Guild is trying to do here... Obviously, Amazon's lawyers have considered what the implications of an text-to-speech service are. As far as I can tell, the AG isn't even filing a lawsuit, just a PR complain-campaign. What does that get them?

Conspiracy-hat-interpretation: this is great PR for the Kindle's new text-to-speech features. If it wasn't for the Author's Guild, this would be just another bullet point on the features list. Is this a favor from Roy Blount to Amazon?

More precisely it treats text and audio as distinct works which must be licensed individually. I wrote a lot about this at http://ourdoings.com/ourdoings-startup/2009-02-11

Also, isn't reading on a kindle also like a movie? At least when you scroll, the text is moving across the screen. So I think Amazon should also pay for the movie rights.

I don't think the refresh rate is fast enough to "scroll".

Well, how many frames per second until something is considered to be a movie? ;-)

the refresh rate is way faster in this version. but it doesn't scroll, it just goes to the next page when the voice gets to that point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com