ThePrivacyMovement

The Authors Guild warned Thursday that Amazon’s newest digital e-book reader’s voice function is likely violating writers’ copyrights — an assertion intellectual property experts said was baseless.

“Until this issue is worked out, Amazon may be undermining your audio market as it exploits your e-books,” the guild told its members in a memo Thursday.

The issue concerns a function on the Kindle 2 that permits a user to enable a robotron-like voice to read the literature aloud.

“They don’t have the right to read a book out loud,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. “That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.”

In short, the guild says authors should be awarded audio-licensing fees for these e-books, as is the case in the billion audio-book market in which writers or actors orate novels. Out-loud reading by a machine is fine, the guild said, “if it’s from an authorized audio copy.”(…)

http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired27b/~3/IT5PUKqf89Y/copyright-fight.html