Cory Doctorow’s post on gaurdian.co.uk views Amazon’s Kindle 2 text-to-speech feature is not so much violating authors’ copyright but rather basic consumer rights. On the subject of text to speech:
But ultimately, the legality of the feature is irrelevant – as is the nonsensical discussion about whether the Kindle’s text-to-speech is (or will someday be) as good as a commercial, human-generated audiobook (the answers being, “No,” and “The day that artificial intelligence gives us perfect Kindle readings, we’ll have bigger fish to fry than audiobook rights”).
The reason it’s irrelevant is that Amazon wants to get licenses from members of the Authors Guild in order to sell their books in the Kindle store.
And when Amazon goes to those members, they can simply say, “No, I won’t let you sell my books because the Kindle has a text-to-speech capability and I don’t like it.” No need to go into bizarre, long-winded speculations about whether copyright law requires Amazon to build copyright enforcement into its devices, or whether Jeff Bezos’s crack team of AI wizards at Amazon are about to unleash an army of superintelligent artificial voice-actors, sandwiched within the Kindle’s slender chassis.
admin Miscellaneous books, copyright
Mark Cuban asks: (and a lively discussion ensues)
Mar 29th 2009 6:16PM
Here is a question for all you legal scholars out there. Is a tweet copyrightable ? Is a tweet copyrighted by default when its published ? Can there possibly be a fair use exception for something that is only 140 characters or less ?
I got to thinking about this when I tweeted about an NBA game. I tweeted to the people who follow me. While I never asked that they not distribute it to other tweeters, i did not give anyone permission to republish my tweets in a commercial newspaper, magazine or website.
So when an ESPN.com or any other outlet republishes a tweet, have they violated copyright law ?
Is twittering the process of publishing in 140 characters or less, or is it a private communications to those that follow you ? Even if you dont block outsiders from seeing it ?
You could also extend this to Facebook. Do you own your status update ? Is it a private communications between you and friends, or is a published work ? If a newspaper or website wants to publish your status update, do they need permission first ?
admin Miscellaneous copyright, social media
Eric Clemons
, Professor of Operations and Information Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania argues that the Internet shatters all forms of advertising. “The problem is not the medium, the problem is the message, and the fact that it is not trusted, not wanted, and not needed.”. He writes:
Pushing a message at a potential customer when it has not been requested and when the consumer is in the midst of something else on the net, will fail as a major revenue source for most internet sites. This is particularly true when the consumer knows that the sponsor of the ad has paid to have this information, which was verified by no one, thrust at him. The net will find monetization models and these will be different from the advertising models used by mass media, just as the models used by mass media were different from the monetization models of theater and sporting events before them.
Full story and lively commentary on TechCrunch here.
admin Miscellaneous advertising
Ian Brown has an insightful take on Twitter in the Globe and Mail
Randomness is the hooligan we all fear. Unmerited suffering, the premature death of loved ones, physical disaster - these are the sources of what Julian Huxley, the famous evolutionary biologist, called “injustice at the hands of the cosmos.” That cosmic injustice “represents the persistence of chance and its amorality in human life.”
So - I thought - what’s the standard answer to the awful fact that none of us knows how or when we’ll die?
Carpe diem. Live for today, in the moment, while you can: This is it, it’s not a rehearsal, today is the first day, etc.
And what is Twitter? Twitter is a communications technology, a form of mass instant messaging, that specializes in recording the details of life in the moment.
Is Twitter the new public square or a Tower of Babble? Full story here.
admin Miscellaneous social media
Richard Stallman authored a Free Software manifesto in 1992, and it is worth a read again today. To better understand what free software is, this from the
Free Software Foundation:
Free software
is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free
as in free speech,
not as in free beer.
Free software is a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:
- The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
- The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
Read Robert Stallman’s essay is here.
admin Miscellaneous free
Detailed look at copyright and copyleft (creative commons) licensing by
Sharee L. Broussard
This review begins with an examination of the ways that existing copyright laws and practices compare with the Creative Commons Legal Code. It then explains how this idea of copyleft works, how it began, and why its proponents encourage its widespread use to satisfy the disconnect existing between current intellectual property laws and common Internet practices. The essay concludes with a discussion of the pros and cons of the system.
Full Story here.
admin Miscellaneous copyright, creative commons
Nicholas Deleon writes on TechCrunch about the future of music listening:
[M]ost of us are at least familiar with streaming, on-demand music from pick-your-service (Imeem, Pandora, Spotify, Rhapsody, etc.), will people in the future still see music as a “thing” that they’ll own, or more like a service that they’ll tap into whenever the need arises? Will people still cling to a finite number of MP3s on theiriPod, or will they prefer to have their music on The Cloud.
The post extends this conversation around the perception of music—is it a service or something to own?
Full story here.
admin Miscellaneous cloud, music
This story on Wired.com:
The Obama administration for the first time is weighing in on a Recording Industry Association of America file sharing lawsuit and is supporting hefty awards of as much as $150,000 per purloined music track.
The government said the damages range of $750 to $150,000 per violation of the Copyright Act was warranted.
Uh, oh! Let the suing continue!
admin Miscellaneous music
Robert Darnton tries to unravel the implications of the ‘Google Books Settlement’ and its impact on the future by looking at the past:
When I look backward, I fix my gaze on the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment, its faith in the power of knowledge, and the world of ideas in which it operated—what the enlightened referred to as the Republic of Letters. The eighteenth century imagined the Republic of Letters as a realm with no police, no boundaries, and no inequalities other than those determined by talent. Anyone could join it by exercising the two main attributes of citizenship, writing and reading. Writers formulated ideas, and readers judged them. Thanks to the power of the printed word, the judgments spread in widening circles, and the strongest arguments won.
Engaging read in The New York Review here.
admin Miscellaneous books, intellectual property