Quote:
Originally Posted by whitearrow
The AG's statement, of course, assumes without discussion that TTS implicates "audio rights" in the first place, which is what they want everyone to simply accept. I would argue that there's a very good case to be made that TTS does implicate audio rights at all.
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My take on what has happened is:
Someone thinks they can squeeze extra money by claiming that TTS is an incremental right. If you take this to court you have to prove that it violates "audio rights" and you'd lose. Instead you write it into contracts and get a bunch of people to sign it. Now you can claim in court that "of course it's an incremental right I own, all these people signed contracts recognizing it as such."
I think the Author's guild was played the fall guys for the above game of some publisher(s) and they're taking all the bad PR.
The sad thing is that even if they win nobody is going to pay any more money for an ebook with TTS enabled vs disabled. I think of it like a bakery asking me if I wanted to buy the right to be able to toast the bread because if you then butter it and sprinkle sugar on it, "then it will cut into my donut sales". Even if they win this as an incremental right it's worth $0.
The only party that wins is the DRM vendor because now you have to pay them to manage your $0 "TTS right" that you signed into a contract.