On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 9:52 AM, Eric Scoles <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > On 2009-03-03, Dave Henn <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> >> >> [snip] > > >> Probably. You know what, screw it. Why should I pay for any of the extra >> forms of works I do? Why don't I just have a machine transform the cheapest >> forms into a different form and enjoy the alternate forms for free that way? >> Stephen King and Rowling will never feel the difference, and the smaller >> authors are going to get screwed anyway. So, buy used copies of books, have >> a machine convert the books into digital text, then have the digital text >> converted into audio, and boom. I can have my audio books for half the >> price, probably much less if I'm willing to buy used copies whose covers are >> in bad shape. True, right now converting the book into digital text is time >> consuming for those of us who don't have the kind of automated book scanners >> used by Google and the Library of Congress. But technology changes. >> > > > This is what I would call 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater.' > > I also think this misses many of the points that have been made over the > past many messages in this and the other thread. Audiobooks produced by > conventional means are not simple transformations, > but rather, new performances -- to the extent that they resemble simple > transformations, they are failures. Look to music IP law for the apt > analogy. What does music IP say about this? That's the real issue in music > piracy: Performance. (That's what drives the fact that Jonathan alludes to, > below: Artists get jack shit from the RIAA > because the performances are owned by the studios.) > No, the points are not missed. I'm expanding on Craig's argument that copyright owners should not be entitled to receive compensation for automated transformations. If I shouldn't have to pay for Kindle's performance of a text, why should I have to pay for any of the other steps above after I buy the used copy of the book? As for the issue of performance, I disagree that Kindle readings are not performances. They aren't good ones right now, but they're performances. My Mac reads things better than many humans. In fact, it reads things better than a few of the people Audible pays to read. Kindle is supposed to be even better than that. More improvements are not far off. So Craig and you appear to be arguing that a performance is only a performance if a human does it. On a more practical level, if Amazon decides to fire all the actors it's been paying to read books for Audible in favor of its more advanced form of Kindle's reading software, should they have to pay anyone for it? Based on the premise that machine reading is not performance, why should they? I At the same time as you and Craig argue that Kindle is not performing, you're saying that RIAA owns performances of music. But the performances RIAA owns are recordings of humans (playing instruments or, in some cases, programming instruments to make music). RIAA to my knowledge hasn't gone after anyone for having sheet music automatically converted into musical performances (though I personally own software that can do this on a basic level). So I don't really get the analogy there. [snip] > > Hey - isn't Google transforming legally-obtained and authorized copies of >> works into an alternate form using an algorithm? >> > > > You mean by scanning print books -- or by caching web pages? > > Nobody here has really argued in support of either. My understanding is > that the whole book-scanning thing is a major, major gray area and is > essentially just being papered over with "google IS not-evil" happytalk. > Kind of a legal time bomb waiting to blow up under Google, and they're just > assumign that they're big enough for it not to hurt them more than the > scanning helps them. But I haven't followed it really closely, so that could > be a totally off-base impression. > Scanning print books. It's an automated transformation of a legally obtained copy of a work into another form. I'm not saying anyone has argued for the specific form, but looking to other examples of automated transformations. You're right, it is a huge grey area and Google came under a lot of fire - I am not sure where it stands, now. My point was that why _should_ Google have to worry if it's automated transformation of a work into another form? But the situation being unsettled, I suppose it's not really helpful even if it isn't "disanalogous" because a company is doing it for ... some reason ... instead of an individual doing it for private use. So, never mind about the Google book scanning. One of the points I tried to make early in the thread is that the Kindle reading issue was more than a simple attempt to control what a user does with the text they buy from Amazon. It's also about capturing revenue that could be lost from people using it instead of buying audio books because of Amazon's marketing the reading feature of the product. To that extent, maybe it doesn't really matter whether the reading feature induces an infringement of copyright. I am spending way too much time on this and have to bow out. -- Dave Henn [email protected] --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
