The iPad raises the question anew: Is it legal for e-books to go audible?
We still haven鈥檛 settled all the pricing squabbles that arrived with the advent of e-books, let alone . Now, the iPad is reigniting questions about the audible versions of such questions: Is it legal for ebook readers to include features that read e-books out loud?
The iPad will include such 鈥渁udio dictations, a controversial feature that caused some trouble for Amazon鈥檚 Kindle last year,鈥� .
When the Kindle 2 shipped with a similar feature last year, the executive director of the Authors Guild told the that 鈥�"they don't have the right to read a book out loud...That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law."
An Amazon spokesperson pointed out to the WSJ that a computer-generated voice was not about to be mistaken for a performance on an audiobook. Still, Amazon later 鈥済ave rights-owners the choice to enable or disable the audio function title by title,鈥� said Wired.
The legal fallout isn鈥檛 yet clear, but comments on the Wired piece show how the copyright questions are already colliding with the modern world. One writer said he could already select the text of anything on his screen using his Safari browser and have his computer read it aloud. What makes a book different? Others asked whether blocking the iPad feature would discriminate against blind or visually impaired users, violating the Americans with Disabilities Act. And, in a more old-fashioned application, one commenter wrote that under the Authors Guild鈥檚 reasoning 鈥渋t would also be illegal for me to read a book out loud to my grandkids.鈥�
What are your thoughts?
Rebekah Denn blogs at .
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