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Originally Posted by starrigger
1. The technology will improve, and the day may come when TTS really does infringe (in a way that's meaningful to the average person) on licenses that are reserved for true audio performances. At that point, it would be much more difficult to draw a line in the sand.
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At that point, audiobooks will be dead (though maybe artificially, read legally, kept alive) and licenses for audio performances will be moot. Are there separate licenses for photocopying and handwritten reproduction? Is display on a screen prohibited because photocopying rights are not granted?
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2. There may well be infringement right now on technical rights that are currently spelled out in book contracts, involving sound or audible versions of books. I consider it a safe bet that Amazon would not have pulled back on what was a great marketing stroke if they didn't see genuine legal issues in front of them. They tried to make it sound as though they just wanted rights-holders to feel "comfortable," but unless Amazon has had a personality transplant, that's a load of dingoes' kidneys.
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I don't know what the contracts say, but the only possible explanation I can understand is that the TTS feature in the Kindle 2 would bypass a possible (implicit or explicit) blocking of TTS in the ebooks, as if, say, it would provide screenshot+OCR capabilities to bypass copy-disabled ebooks.