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Old 02-11-2009, 04:09 PM   #40
pdurrant
The Grand Mouse 高貴的老鼠
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Thhere is a vast difference between text to speech for personal use, and public performance/broadcast of the same.

Are you suggesting that parents reading bedtime stories to their children are violating authors' copyrights? After all, if the children are lucky, it's being read with much better emotion and vocal inflection than any text to speech programme is capable of.

Should parents be forced to buy a spoken word version of a book, and play it at bedtime while pointing to the printed words in the book? After all, reading aloud is an obvious violation of copyright.

Of course not. I'm being absurd. As are you.

Quote:
Originally Posted by rhadin View Post
So if C3PO were to read your novels at a packed stadium where the robot charged a $5 entry fee to hear his/her machine synthesized voice read Sunborn without your permission and without paying you a royalty fee, you would think that wouldn't violate your copyright and would be OK?

Do I understand correctly that the position being taken by those who think Amazon is within its rights is that as long as it is a machine voice rather than a live being it is OK? No matter how good a voice it is? (Think Hal in 2001.)

If so, then perhaps the way to resolve matters for the consumer is to have Amazon or someone else record books using mechanical/robotic voices to read the text and then distribute them free over the Internet to anyone interested. After all, if Amazon's system doesn't violate copyright, this shouldn't either. Do you think JK Rowling would agree?
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