The new Kindle 2 from Amazon has a new feature that could end up the topic of a very intriguing court battle between Amazon on the Authors Guild. The potential dispute is centered around the new text-to-speech feature in the Kindle 2. Text-to-speech will allow owners of the Kindle 2 to have the e-books they purchase and download read to them by the Kindle device. There is no audio file of the book. Instead, Kindle uses a program that has a computerized voice "read" the text and convert it into sound.The Authors Guild has made statements suggesting that Amazon's use of the text-to-speech feature is a violation of copyright law. This copyright law protects audio books by not allowing audio copies of books to be provided along with a written version of the book at no charge. So it would be illegal for a book seller to make an audio recording of a book and include it with the written version. The copyright law also works in reverse, protecting the written copy of a book from an audio copy. So in essence, a written version of a book does not give the purchaser rights to an audio version of the book.
In a statement by the Authors Guild, they bring up the fact that audio books made up over $1 billion in sales in 2007 alone. They believe that text-to-speech in the Kindle 2 "presents a significant challenge to the publishing industry". They take a bit of a jab at the text-to-speech quality by calling is "serviceable", but then acknowledge that they expect the technology "to improve rapidly". So they see the text-to-speech feature in the Kindle 2 to be a threat to their audio book industry. While they have not taken any legal actions, they are looking into the possibility and are advising authors and publishers to protect their rights against the text-to-speech feature.
On the surface, it would seem fairly straight forward that Amazon is in violation of this copyright law, right? Not so fast. Amazon states, and many legal observers agree, that text-to-speech does not violate this copyright law due to the fact that text-to-speech is not the same as a pre-recorded audio book. There is no audio file in the Kindle 2. There is no pre-recording. It is simply a program that assists in the reading of text by converting it live into voice.
In fact, text-to-speech programs have been around for a long time. There are many companies who offer text-to-speech programs with the largest being Nuance Communications. Nuance provides text-to-speech to a number of industries including GPS units, cell phones, vehicle voice control systems and more. Nuance is also the company who has provided Amazon with the license on their text-to-speech program in the Kindle 2. Text-to-speech is becoming more common in electronic devices, but has been used for years to assist the visually impaired.
So who is in the right on this issue? It is difficult, maybe impossible, to say at this point. It will likely have to go to court, as it is such a gray legal area where no prior legal decisions have been made. Without any precedent, a judge will have to make a decision that could have major impacts on audio books and the future of text-to-speech technology. This should make for an interesting legal battle in the upcoming months and years.
-BeeHawk-
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