[gui-talk] kindle, copyrights, authors guild, Amazon, etc.

[Hoffman, Allen]

I'd like to post this to promote some movement regarding this whole
text-to-speech issue with the Kindle and content.  Also, a lawyer or
five would be helpful to nail these basic points down to legal form and
begin moving our legal wheels to advocate for following the laws, or
promoting changes if needed.

First, copyrightable audio-books should only include those read by human
readers.  If this is a legal change, someone should start the wheels
moving to implement it.

Second, since people do have the right to convert content to make it
accessible for people with disabilities, if in specialized format
limited to those people with disabilities, all the Kindle folks need do
is allow people with disabilities to register, e.g. bookshare, and then
set that unit to ignore the audio-book permissions flag in content.  I
suppose someone would say the user must log in to the Kindle, but lets
get real folks, that's just crazy talk.

If these things both were done, this issue would fade away.  I also
think the authors guild needs to be publicly exposed as advocating for
narrow, greedy approach to managing their copyrights.