Is the new Kindle 2 illegal?


Sales for the original Kindle were so high during last year's shopping season, the manufacturers of the new Kindle 2 which will begin shipping on Feb. 24 (at $359 a pop) learned their lesson and beefed up production for what they believed would be a great product and would sell just as fast. What they didn't realize is that even though this new Kindle is slimmer and has a few more features such as a five-way navigation element and faster wireless service for downloading books, one feature is against the law according to Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild.

"They don't have the right to read a book out loud," he says. "That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law."

Ouch. Yes, another new feature which has potential buyers chomping at the bit to have one is their text-reading feature which enables readers to not only download books, but listen to them, too.

Granted, the voice is computer generated and may become annoying after awhile, but just think how nice that would be. For once, we can listen to our favorite books while in the shower, on our treadmill, even while driving.

But all good things might come to an end if this isn't resolved.

The problem exists because of the simple fact that a retailer can't record a copy of a book on CD and sell it without paying a separate fee for this, something the manufacturers of the new Kindle 2 didn't obviously think of.

But Amazon refuses to budge.

What's your opinion? Is this copyright infringement?

4 comments:

  1. Huh, that's a good point. I never would have thought about that, but I suppose it would be the same as buying an audio book. As long as a person purchases the book, I can't think of a reason why it would be illegal. It's not pirating or anything of that nature, I don't think. I'm curious exactly how that works - is there a separate program that goes with the two - one an audio version and one a written? Would you have to pay a different price for one that has audio in addition to the written book?
    I would love to get a reader of some sort someday, but am totally clueless about them!

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  2. Anonymous8:28 PM

    I imagine it to be similar to the adobe PDF feature where you can have it read the document aloud. The voice is annoying, and not very user friendly, since the few documents I tried it on, you have to actually click on the paragraph before it reads it.

    The issue I think arises in format. Amazon is paying the publisher a certain price for rights to distribute a particular format...in this case the electronic book rights, not audio rights. Therefore I believe it would be an infringement on the copyright. Now if Amazon had negotiated to purchase both rights and chose to offer them jointly in Kindle format, then I don't see issue there, but it would appear this is not the case.

    Interesting issue and it will be nice to see the outcome of this.

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  3. All I can say is it will be interesting to see how this all pans out.
    Margay

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  4. Anonymous12:32 PM

    I've been watching this play out....my question is what on earth will Amazon do if (or I tend to think, when) it is determined that they've infringed on the audio copyright. I'm assuming many Kindles will have hit the market by then.

    And how many people are going to buy it for this feature?

    This could get a little ugly.

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