On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 10:46 PM, Jameson Russell
<[email protected]> wrote:
> There are two main problems though. #1 is that the Kindle was advertised as
> having this feature, we all expected it, the hardware supports it, and it
Yes, it was a dumb marketing move. But it's not legally or socially
much different from having a DRM book reader in the first place, imo.
> reader in general. #2 Is it really a derivative?
Good question. It sure is under current law: transformation from text
to audio is just one of many ways one can produce a derivative of a
work. My opinion: it should not be (but your examples below should).
I'd like to fix copyright law so that minimally-creative
transformations cannot be separately licensed, and so that
single-party licenses are limited in what sorts of hoops they can make
users jump through to be considered 'in compliance'. But note that
this is about how granular author's rights over 'derivatives' and
'interpretation' can be, not about the DRM itself.
> Suppose I scoured youtube
> and created a script that would play certain sections of videos one after
> another in sequence, which when listened to had the words for Cory
> Doctorow's book Little Brother. Now, Cory Doctorow is a pretty nice guy, and
> would probably post it to his blog, but is what I have created a derivative
> of his book?
My preferred rule of thumb is :
if you produced / could reasonably produce? the final work by
applying a script or function that was designed without knowledge
of the original works
to the original work
with minimal custom or creative tuning or alteration
then the resulting work is not derivative in a significantly creative
way, and any rights you have to use, share, interpret, transform, or
reuse w.r.t. the original work you should also have w.r.t. the final
work.
> Is the script a derivative of Doctorow's book? Is it a derivative of the
> original
> vidoes?
I think in your case you created a special script to do what you
wanted for this work, so yes, it and these other elements are
creatively derivative by my rot.
> Isn't this much like what happens when the Kindle "reads" it scours
> for prerecorded sounds and slaps them together on the fly.
No, the Kindle presumably uses a tts program which has not been
specially trained and customized on its input texts, and is being
uncreatively applied to those texts. Custom readings by talented
readers who first grasped the emotion and importance of the passage
would be significantly different.
> I for one am not convinced a program, hardware, or script constitutes a true
> derivative work.
> I'm sure many will disagree.
There's no consensus on a lot of this, and not even a clear sense of
philosophical direction that I can see (stark tell me if you have good
examples!), just lots of case law.
SJ
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