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Authors Guild President Wants To End Royalty-Free TTS On Kindle 539

An anonymous reader writes "The president of the Authors Guild has launched a rant in the NY Times about how the Kindle 2 provides Text-to-Speech capabilities that, oh the horror, allow the user to have any text on the Kindle read to her. Roy Blunt, Jr. moans that this is copyright infringement of audio books, and that Kindle users should be forced to pay royalties on audio even though they've already paid for the text version of a book! Amazingly he harps on about how TTS technology has become so good that it may replace humans — and then uses this to argue that it's unfair for Kindle to provide TTS! I think the Authors Guild need a new president — someone less of a Luddite, and more familiar with copyright law." (See also the Guild's executive director's similar claims that reading aloud, royalty-free, is an illegal function of software.)

Comment Re:Ahh ... the generosity (Score 2, Interesting) 280

>You WANT something like that? Remember what happened whenever the government started giving grants to modernize America with phone lines? The AT&T monopoly was formed.

Yes, I think we need another monopoly like that. Because basic research is a huge tragedy of the commons problem, you need a big monopoly that *is* the commons. When AT&T was, they were able to create one of the best research labs ever and invented the transistor which has accelerated human development at exponential speeds.

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