I've been fascinated lately by the hubbub over Kindle's text to speech capability. As you may know, Kindle is an ebook reader and it now has the ability to 'read' ebooks out loud. Publishers, of course, argue that this technology infringes the copyright to the audiobook. Others would argue that when you buy a book, you buy the right to read it out loud, and that the robotic voice produced by Kindle is no substitute for an audiobook anyway.
Some authors have weighed in on the issue. Here's what Wil Wheaton had to say. And Neil Gaiman. And Cory Doctorow. Who do you side with?
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Sorry for such a late comment on this, was doing a little backreading of the blog this morning!
I think this perfectly illustrates how completely backward our copyright laws are worldwide in light of new technologies. As copyright infringement cases become more laughable the laws will eventually get tighter as they try to cover just about every permutation of information and eventually the whole system will simply break wide open.
Digital technology is making current copyright law obsolete, and new attempts to enforce this imaginary idea of ownership even scarier, see Rasmus Fleicher's article: http://www.cato-unbound.org/2008/06/09/rasmus-fleischer/the-future-of-copyright/.
I really love this article on the topic. It's a nice philosophical overview of how the relatively new concept that an artist can claim ownership of an idea ever came to be: http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/nimustext.html
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