02-27-2009, 06:40 PM | #1 | |
Sir Penguin of Edinburgh
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Amazon Caves on Text-To-Speech
As you may know, there has been a public debate going on since 9 February over whether Amazon had the right to create the TTS ability of the K2. You can read what the Author's Guild has said here, and here. I just received this press release.
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But there is an upside. There is an exception to the DMCA that allows for DRM removal of ebooks that have TTS ability disabled. The K2 jeopardized the exception because it had TTS for all ebooks. Now that it doesn't, I can legally remove DRM from my ebooks again. This is completely wrong. |
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02-27-2009, 06:54 PM | #2 | |
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"no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given." I am assuming they've decided it's not worth alienating the content creators and publishers, so they will lock TTS for some titles. Then it will be the market that decides if these would sell. I already know which way I'll go. |
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02-27-2009, 07:05 PM | #3 | |
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02-27-2009, 07:08 PM | #4 |
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I'm not sure I'm understanding correctly, but has the net result of the Authors Guild outburst been to essentially allow us all to remove DRM from ebooks legally?
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02-27-2009, 07:27 PM | #5 | ||
Sir Penguin of Edinburgh
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I am not a lawyer
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http://www.copyright.gov/1201/2006/index.html So if a DRMed ebook can't be run through TTS software because of the DRM, you can legally remove it. The really cool part is that it doesn't matter why you want to remove the DRM. If a title is available only in eReader, you can remove the DRM. If it is available in MSReader but has the TTS disabled, you can remove the DRM. The K2 threatened this becuase it had the vast majority of ebook available in the US, and it could play all of them on TTS. EDIT:I was completely wrong on this. If I had written the exception quoted above, I would have stated who it applied to and why. They did not because the limited nature of the exception is stated in the DMCA. Basically, you can only remove DRM from ebooks if you need to use TTS. If you are not adversely affected by TTS being disabled, you cannot remove DRM. |
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02-27-2009, 07:42 PM | #6 |
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Seems like the only people who won out in this battle are the consumers (for once)
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02-27-2009, 07:45 PM | #7 |
Sir Penguin of Edinburgh
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02-27-2009, 08:24 PM | #8 | |
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Dale |
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02-27-2009, 08:28 PM | #9 | |
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One of the reasons I fear that DRM is so prevalent in all forms of media is that consumers aren't advised properly about what it does, and what it prevents them from doing. But once they get stung by DRM there's no turning back. Nothing more galling than paying out money only to realise the product has been rendered useless by idiotic protection schemes or other market restricting techniques. My first experience of the ridiculousness of DRM/protection was with DVD. I imported a R1 DVD from America and couldn't play it on any of my players. A quick search, a few keypresses on my remote, and the region encoding on the DVD was stripped away. DRM is redundant in all ways, apart from a false sense of security that it provides the content providers. |
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02-27-2009, 09:02 PM | #10 |
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Here's my take on it at TeleRead.org.
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02-27-2009, 09:54 PM | #11 |
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Probably explains the firmware update? https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=40383
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02-27-2009, 09:57 PM | #12 |
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Has anyone noticed a book that has the TTS turned off?
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02-27-2009, 10:04 PM | #13 |
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02-27-2009, 10:07 PM | #14 | |
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02-27-2009, 11:22 PM | #15 |
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Ahem.... can you give this clueless person a pointer on how one might go about removing DRM?
I was completely BUMMED out about this news and seething about Author's Guild, but this news cheers me up considerably! |
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