I have been too busy to write part 2 of my series on copyright law. Part 2 will be about the exciting legal case American Geophysical Union v. Texaco so you will all want to stay tuned for that.
Instead today I link to a bOING bOING post by Rob Beschizza mocking a claim by the Authors Guild that text-to-speech software infringes copyright. The scenario: a reader pays to download a Kindle book and activates the Kindle's read-out-loud feature causing a transient copy of the work to manifest as vibrations in nearby air molecules.
US Customs and State Department issue more grossly overbroad restrictions
on behalf of another unfriendly authoritarian government, this time Pakistan
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The US State Department and its Cultural Heritage Center have again
deputized U.S. Customs and Homeland Security to enforce the export controls
of anot...
1 week ago
2 comments:
I have not seen a more rediculous lawsuit in some time. The scary thing is that in the bizarro world we live in they may actually win!
Agreed.
Marilynn Byerly has a nice blog post on Kindle Text-to-speech.
Congress passed very complex copyright laws with no clear guidelines. The courts have created all sorts of "balancing tests" but it's kind of pathetic that in 2009 we need a human judge and 2+ lawyers to figure out if a work is OK to manipulate in some way for some purpose. Maybe in 1900 when there were only a few hundred printing presses this made sense. If every printer, CD-R burner, DVD-R burner, fax machine and computer speaker counts as a printing press then I have a dozen "printing presses" in my home. There are probably more presses than people now. Congress needs to wake up and simplify copyright.
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