Authors Guild Views on "Kindle Swindle"

Roy Blount, the President of the Authors Guild, has an op-ed in today's NY Times enticingly entitled "The Kindle Swindle?" It concerns the latest version of Amazon's portable book reading device that can read aloud using a computer synthesized voice (choice of male or female), in contrast to a classic "audio book" that will be read by one or more professional actors or the author. Previous Kindles were designed primarily for reading from the screen.

The new Amazon Kindle can "read" the book using speech synthesis technology, which is hardly a new development as such. However, the Authors Guild is concerned about its deployment in the very user friendly (except to blind people) Kindle format:

Blount says:

What the guild is asserting is that authors have a right to a fair share of the value that audio adds to Kindle 2’s version of books. For this, the guild is being assailed. On the National Federation of the Blind’s Web site, the guild is accused of arguing that it is illegal for blind people to use “readers, either human or machine, to access books that are not available in alternative formats like Braille or audio.”
...

The guild is also accused of wanting to profiteer off family bedtime rituals. A lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation sarcastically warned that “parents everywhere should be on the lookout for legal papers haling them into court for reading to their kids.”

For the record: no, the Authors Guild does not expect royalties from anybody doing non-commercial performances of “Goodnight Moon.” If parents want to send their children off to bed with the voice of Kindle 2, however, it’s another matter.

HK

National Federation for the Blind and the Authors Guild

Here's the American NFB (National Federal of the Blind press release re Kindle 2.0 and the Authors Guild statements.

Re the Authors Guild, the NFB says:

Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, said: “The National Federation of the Blind supports all technologies that allow blind people to have better access to the printed word, including the ability of devices like the Kindle 2 to read commercial e-books aloud using text-to-speech technology. Although the Authors Guild claims that it supports making books accessible to the blind, its position on the inclusion of text-to-speech technology in the Kindle 2 is harmful to blind people. The Authors Guild says that having a book read aloud by a machine in the privacy of one’s home or vehicle is a copyright infringement. But blind people routinely use readers, either human or machine, to access books that are not available in alternative formats like Braille or audio. Up until now, no one has argued that this is illegal, but now the Authors Guild says that it is. This is absolutely wrong. The blind and other readers have the right for books to be presented to us in the format that is most useful to us, and we are not violating copyright law as long as we use readers, either human or machine, for private rather than public listening. The key point is that reading aloud in private is the same whether done by a person or a machine, and reading aloud in private is never an infringement of copyright.

Re Amazon, they say:

“Amazon has taken a step in the right direction by including text-to-speech technology for reading e-books aloud on its new Kindle 2,” Dr. Maurer continued. “We note, however, that the device itself cannot be used independently by a blind reader because the controls to download a book and begin reading it aloud are visual and therefore inaccessible to the blind. We urge Amazon to rectify this situation as soon as possible in order to make the Kindle 2 a device that truly can be used both by blind and sighted readers. By doing so, Amazon will make it possible for blind people to purchase a new book and begin reading it immediately, just as sighted people do.”

This all sounds pretty sensible to me. Hopefully, Canada will be active in promoting a WIPO treaty for rights of the blind.

HK

Amazon Caves on Kindle

Without a shot being fired, other than some over the bow over the top op-ed rhetoric by the Authors Guild possibly based upon a fanciful and far-fetched "derivative works" theory, Amazon has caved in to the Guild on its useful new Kindle technology to "read aloud" an electronic version of a book using computer synthesized speech.

Larry Lessig is scathing and makes a comparison to the Google books settlement. One of the problems with that that comparison is that that Amazon has settled here without even seeing a claim filed.

Perhaps the reason can be found in the AP story thhat notes that Amazon admits that it, too, has an interest in audio books:

Amazon said in a statement that it, too, has a stake in the success of the audiobook market, and pointed to its Brilliance Audio and Audible subsidiaries, which publish and sell professionally recorded readings.

"Nevertheless, we strongly believe many rights holders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver's seat," the company said.

Once again, questions of cross ownership, vertical integration, voluntary stifling of innovation and almost forgotten anti-trust basic principles and near comatose antitrust enforcement come to mind.

This is tough luck for the blind, for all consumers and for innovative technology. Amazon owes a better explanation.

If there indeed is a "Kindle Swindle" underway here, it's the public interest that appears to be the most obvious victim at this point.

HK

Kindling Patent Litigation

As if Amazon hasn't had enough troubles lately with its Kindle 2 product, it has now been sued for patent infringement of this patent by Discovery Communications. The patent in question was filed for in 1999 and issued in 2007.

Here's the abstract:

The invention, electronic book security and copyright protection system, provides for secure distribution of electronic text and graphics to subscribers and secure storage. The method may be executed at a content provider's site, at an operations center, over a video distribution system or over a variety of alternative distribution systems, at a home subsystem, and at a billing and collection system. The content provider or operations center and/or other distribution points perform the functions of manipulation and secure storage of text data, security encryption and coding of text, cataloging of books, message center, and secure delivery functions. The home subsystem connects to a secure video distribution system or variety of alternative secure distribution systems, generates menus and stores text, and transacts through communicating mechanisms. A portable book-shaped viewer is used for secure viewing of the text. A billing system performs the transaction, management, authorization, collection and payments utilizing the telephone system or a variety of alternative communication systems using secure techniques.

Here's the story.

This comes at more or less the same time as Amazon is invoking the DMCA against an entity that provides software to enable the use of ebooks from other vendors on its Kindle products.

Who was it who said something about promoting "the progress of science and useful arts"?

HK

Kindle Issue Flares Up Again

As reported in Publishers Weekly:

Some 200 people with print disabilities--physical impairments that restrict their ability to read print--protested in front of the Authors Guild headquarters in New York today, rallying against the Guild's attempt to get Amazon to disable the Kindle 2's text-to-speech function. The protestors, led by the National Federation of the Blind, chanted “We want e-books!” “Literacy for all of us!” and “Two, four, six, eight, the Authors Guild discriminates!”

See the rest of this story. It isn't going away soon.

See also Abraham Lloyd's Tweets reported here by Jamie Love and the use of the rather catcy expression:

“Stop the Greed! We want to Read!”

Kindling Copyight Controversy

The L.A. Times, which is hardly an anti-copyright publication, has a good editorial today that comes down against the Authors Guild position and Amazon's "capitulation."

It concludes:

Innovators such as Amazon are and should be free to create devices that help consumers exploit all of the rights they obtain when they purchase books and other copyrighted material. And by the way, Authors Guild: Amazon sells e-books. The Kindle makes those products more appealing to consumers, which makes them more valuable to authors and publishers. If authors hope to compete in the digital era, they need the e-book market to succeed. Stripping features from the Kindle 2 won't help.

The real issue here is that the Authors Guild is forcing Amazon, which is not exactly a weakling, NOT to innovate and to deny users' rights. The Authors Guild argument is based upon specious legal arguments for rights that do not exist. Amazon caved for its own business reasons.

This is yet another example of users' rights being blocked off by TPM and DRM, imposed for "business" and not legal reasons. That's why its very difficult for most non techie people to snip out portions of DVDs for perfectly legal purposes - such as research or criticism.

If antitrust enforcers ever awake from their long sleep filled with dreams that IP owners rarely if ever do more than merely enforce their IP rights, things might get better before they get worse. In any event, Canada must consider legislation that expressly enables the circumvention for legal purposes of DRM and TPM locks.

Otherwise, we will sooner rather than later live in a world of perpetual copyright, with no effective fair use/dealing rights and no ability to copy insubstantial portions of works. These are users rights that have been enjoyed since the earliest days of technoloy. New legislation should guarantee these rights - not guarantee their elimination, as Bill C-61 would have done.

HK

On CRTC, Kindle, Copyright Board, Copyright & Controversy

Michael Geist has unearthed the CRTC submission to the recent copyright consultation. It was apparently posted just yesterday, October 8, 2009 despite having been submitted on September 11.

The remarkably sensible submission is also remarkable for its frank recommendations on how things might be improved in terms of the tariff setting procedure and the work of the Copyright Board. The CRTC recommendations are quite consistent with my own now old observations found here.

No doubt some eyebrows will be raised about whether one tribunal should be suggesting changes in the way another should operate, for example with respect to:

* timeliness
* cost awards

For its part, the Copyright Board may nonetheless welcome the CRTC's suggestion that the Board should have "the resources necessary to fulfill its mandate within timelines that do not disadvantage the parties before it."

The problem, however, would be that the Canadian Copyright Board is already by far the biggest institution of its kind anywhere in the world. This leads to several other discussions, which I won't deal with here and now.

The CRTC also deals with private copying and the need for a single radio tariff. No fear of controversy here. This is vintage von Finckenstein.

The CRTC is right about its conclusion, which is this:

Copyright is a key instrument enabling the digital knowledge economy. For it to withstand the test of time, the Copyright Act should be reformed in a manner that defies a silo based approach — and includes considerations of related issues such as the extension of access to next generation networks, appropriate funding for the production and digitization of Canadian cultural content, and efforts to encourage research, development and innovation in the communications industries.

This is quite timely. Everyone is beginning to notice the precipitous decline in Canadian innovation that is resulting from a lack of competition in key sectors in Canada and lack of coherence in Canadian policy and regulation. See today's Globe and Mail.

The CRTC's conclusion is perhaps idealistic and not without irony. The CRTC itself has much to answer for in terms of lack of competition in Canadian telecommunications and the noticeable decline in innovation in respect of anything to do with broadband and wireless services. But this submission is a beacon of hope that some, at least, see the need to do things better going forward.

Something has got to give in Canada. I have no doubt that these issues are part of the reason that Canada is among the last to benefit from new technological innovations. For example, even if Amazon can find a carrier competitive enough to cut a decent Kindle deal, it would then likely be zapped with an application for a tariff for the “communication” right filed probably by Access Copyright ("AC") - and it would then have to spend potentially millions on that proceeding which would take years, not to mention the inevitable judicial review. The resulting tariff, if it were finally certified, could increase costs substantially and retroactively but not predictably, and with insignificant benefit to most actual Canadian creators. This is what happens with redundant collectively administered rights - to which our collectives wish to add even more.

HK

Update - A perceptive question/comment from Andrew Martin, former head of Access Copyright - below. Why might AC do this? For the same reason that music publishers have tried to get at least two bites and tariffs at the same online apple, so to speak.

Read My Lips: Don't Move Your Lips While Reading in Public

Perhaps we need an annual award for the most excessive copyright claim of the year. Surely a contender for 2009 would be the Authors Guild assertion that the new Kindle device from Amazon that reads a book you have bought and paid for out loud via computer synthesized voice infringes copyright by creating a derivative work and a performance in public. We are not talking about the unlicensed use of an actor's or author's reading. We are talking about a computer synthesized speech to text device, which is old technology. Here's an article on the Author's Guild assertion.

The Authors Guild should not be taken too lightly, however. They led the charge against Google for its book digitization project. In this case, however, they appear to be in a realm of fantasy.

It didn't take long for bloggers and reporters to begin to wonder what if they are right.

Here's just some of what might happen:

1. It would be illegal to read bed time stories to your children. They will have to read to themselves, once they learn to read. Which may be difficult in the Authors Guild scheme of things.

2. It would generally be illegal to read out loud. Anywhere, but particularly in a public place. If the Authors Guild is right about what is “in public”, everyone should avoid even moving their lips when reading on trains, planes, buses and in parks or on the beach. A good lip reader might be able to free ride. Come to think of it, it's a good idea in any event not to move your lips when you read.

On a seriously serious note, the Author's Guild assertions would render illegal technology long relied upon by the blind and visually handicapped.

HK

Bezos: "stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles"

Jeff Bezoz, the founder and CEO of Amazon, wisely had this to say today about the recent Orwellian 1984 memory hole fiasco:

Initial post: Jul 23, 2009 12:16 PM PDT

Jeffrey P. Bezos says:

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our "solution" to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

With deep apology to our customers,

Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com

(emphasis added)

I must say that such a quick and unequivocal apology is to be commended. (lessons here to be learned by the RIAA, CRIA, ASCAP, Access Copyright, etc.)

What Bezos clearly understands, and the RIAA and its ilk clearly do not, is that "the customer is always right." It's not a good idea to sue and/or screw your fans and/or customers.

Yes, "it's the copyright law, stupid" could become the reply to many burning questions. It was in this instance, since the edition remotely deleted by Amazon was legal in most countries because the copyright had expired, but not in the USA, which had foolishly extended the copyright term to life + 70 years just in time to cover Orwell.

There are obvious lessons to be learned here for Canada.

"It's the DMCA + , stupid" might be a good place to start as CRIA, CIRPA, CMPDA. ESA and others try to bring the DMCA + to Canada.

The DMCA + term extension + "three strikes" are the triple crown that CRIA, CMPDA, ESA and their various emanations are trying to bring to Canada. This is precisely the kind of regime that led Bezos and Amazon into this fiasco.

Ministers Clement and Moore and their officials will hopefully take note.

HK

DRM and the Demise of Textbooks?

Here's a provocative article in today's New York Times, showing that classic printed text books may be on route to extinction sooner rather than later, and there is a lot of money to be saved in this evolution:

In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger this summer announced an initiative that would replace some high school science and math texts with free, “open source” digital versions.

With California in dire straits, the governor hopes free textbooks could save hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

(emphasis added)

And that's just in California - where, as it happens, copyright ownership and "exploitation", as they call it, are considered virtually sacred.

And this is not just going to happen in K-12. The NY Times goes on:

Around the world, hundreds of universities, including M.I.T. and King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Saudi Arabia, now use and share open-source courses. Connexions, a Rice University nonprofit organization devoted to open-source learning, submitted an algebra text to California.

The better publishers will have to adapt. The less adaptable will probably resort to litigation and, in Canada, greater reliance on collective licensing - even when there's little or no basis for it. Don't except Access Copyright in Canada to go gently into the night as "open source" electronic resources in the educational and other sectors threaten their photocopy based foundation, which was never very solid anyway.

One great worry, of course, is that the promise of better and and cheaper text books and resources could be turned into an Orwellian nightmare if DRM is deployed in ways that could allow for censorship, revisionism, "memory hole" deletion, and other means of control by state or private interests. Other means could include the prevention of fair use (fair dealing in Canada), the prevention of cutting and pasting, the prevention of "read aloud" features (as Amazon has also recently done), the prevention of access to the public domain, and other excessive exercises of copyright.

The recent Kindle fiasco shows that all of this this is not only possible but probable.

This once again shows how we need protection from DRM much more than we need protection for it.

HK

Big Brother is Watching and Deleting

In an ironic move, the publishers of Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 have convinced Amazon to remotely delete these titles from Kindle book owners' reader machines. At least the "owners" (as if!) of these copies got their money back. Here's the NY Times story. Big Brother is alive and well and working at Amazon.

Another irony here is that these books are in the public domain in Canada, since Orwell died in 1950.

It's only a matter of time, especially since Canada has embarked on free trade negotiations with the EU, that there will be demands to extend the copyright term to life + 70.

This is also an example of what TPMs, DRM, and contractual override, all as found in and/or enabled by Bill C-61, can do for you.

And why, if Canada is not very careful, we will lose copyright sovereignty for all practical purposes in the brave new world that certain content owners are now seeking.

Ask what would happen if someone - or some government or corporation - could get a court order somewhere or otherwise convince Amazon - to remotely delete a book because it is allegedly libelous, or maybe just politically incorrect or embarrassing to an important person?

Savonarola and Stalin would love this ability to misuse technology. And the "remote delete" tool could put the firemen in Fahrenheit 451 out of business.

Never would happen, you say? That's what everyone said just a few years ago about suing individuals, including children and dead grandmothers, for downloading music.

HK

PS - NY Times is reporting that Amazon deleted the books indeed because of a copyright kerfuffle over disparity in copyright term. Moreover, the disappearance of the boooks may have violated Amazon's own terms of service which reportedly says that Amazon grants customers the right to keep a “permanent copy of the applicable digital content.”

Anyway, no fear. Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener says:

“We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances."

So what other circumstances will lead to a flush down the Orwellian "memory hole"?

And what circumstances led to the reported deletions of Ayn Rand and Harry Potter books?

Another irony here is that if a sophisticated outfit like Amazon can't figure out whether a book is protected by copyright and, if so, who owns it and where, how are ordinary people supposed to figure out such things?

You betcha Big Brother is watching this carefully and loving the possibilities.