On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 10:52 AM, Dave Henn <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > 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? > Depends on what it's used for. If you only use them for yourself, that's fair use, as I understand it. If you sell them, then it's just like you showing movies in a bar without paying a studio or distributor for the privilege. Or playing CDs, for that matter. (Which is why so many bars have gone over to Satellite or Cable Radio and CD Jukeboxes: Because the vendor takes care of the fees they'd otherwise have to pay to distributors.) Or making photocopy versions of The Stand and selling them on the street corner. I fail to see how automated transformation for personal use differs in any way from any of those scenarios. > > > 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. > I can't speak for Craig, but I never argued that. If an autonomous AI or a legally-emancipated dog did the performance, that would be a performance, too. There's also the issue of what constitutes a "performance", and how you distinguish performance from an enhancement of the work. If you add markup to a text to make it more readable, that strikes me as analogous to illustration. It's a clearly derivative work. That's NOT what Kindle is doing. You and I are just going to have to disagree, by the way, about whether such markup (or something analogous) is necessary. I'm saying that if you want stuff like gender, pitch control, accents, cadence, pacing, inflection -- you have to get them through something analogous to markup. Those cues are just not there. Period. I understand that reading software can understand boldface and italics paragraphs and sentences and quotation marks. I understand that you could code a reader to read everything said by 'Kim' in a higher pitch. (As long as it's able to accurately identify who's speaking.) That will be a reading that's inferior to a performance or to an audio rendering of a marked-up work, and I think the reasons why are pretty damned obvious if you pick up a simple example like, say, "With the Bent-Fin Boomer Boys..." (Sorry, got that story on my mind a lot lately.) > > 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 > It depends on the machine reading, and on what you call 'performance.' As noted, I've never claimed that machine readings can't be performances. As noted just above, I think it's more useful to see readings of text that is somehow enhanced for interpretation by machines as the product of a derivative work, much like an illustrated edition -- or a film version for that matter. In both cases, acts of creative interpretation happen. Without that enhancement, it's a simple transformation of an existing text, and no, I don't believe it should be covered, and no, they shouldn't have to pay for anything as long as they're honoring current law. IANAL, so I can only speak about what I think is right, not what the law is. Could the 'creative interpreter' be a machine? Sure. Why not? Still a derivative work, still subject to existing interpretations on that count. Frankly, if it turns out that copyright law supports requiring them to pay for that, I would think it should be changed. > > At the same time as you and Craig argue that Kindle is not performing, > you're saying that RIAA owns performances of music. > Well, the studios, but let's not pick nits. > 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. > Not sure what the problem is. I was looking for a comparison to RIAA's handling of their situation. But yes: They don't go after the simple transformation. They apparently don't think they can make that fly. But the Authors' Guild does. (Same issues exist, of course, w.r.t. interpretation. They are more obvious to most people with music, for some reason I don't understand.) .... > > 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. > If that's what the discussion is about, then we should look at the case of music and video, again: The evidence that revenue is adversely affected overall is questionable at best, and there are likely to be many cases where the revenue is positively affected. We can also draw comparisons to free text releases. There's precious little hard evidence, but what anecdotal evidence is available suggests that sales of a print book can be enhanced by release of free digital versions. Short of AIs that are capable of creatively interpretive performance, I see no reason to suppose that wouldn't also be true of text to speech. (And when such AIs do exist, then we can talk again. But that's a different case.) > > -- eric scoles ([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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
