Alasdair Wilkins at io9 has a very nice article about Asimov’s Robots, focusing on how obeying the Three Laws can still end up with killer robots running around loose. David Brin also put together an interesting post yesterday covering a number of different topics, including the SIGMA group, which had another gathering this past week in D.C.. Wish I had known about the book signing the authors did at Reiter’s Bookstore as part of that event ahead of time, it would have been fun to attend.
Not books about Pirates, but pirating books. Ursela K LeGuin recently found some of her own books available online as downloads, even though neither she nor her publishers had authorized their release in that media. Text pirating has now joined audio and video as a top copyright violation, mostly due to the growing popularity of portable text viewers. There are a lot of legally free books and stories you can read online or download for your portable player (kindle, palmtop, cell phone, etc.). Some are there as a marketing tool to increase sales, some are available because the author released it under a creative commons or equivalent copyright license, some because the copyright has expired. Like everything else, there is a history and controversies about copyright laws, with multinational companies on one side, users of the intellectual properties on the other, and the actual creators lining up on both sides depending on individual inclination and attitude. Personally, I consider it the authors right to decide how they want their works to be made available. Having their work distributed without their permission and without compensation does not create a sustainable creative environment; authors deserve a payday as well.
Earlier this week the NY Times published an opinion by Roy Blount Jr., president of the Authors Guild, railing against the Kindle’s Speach To Text feature, saying Amazon never paid for audio rights to the works it sells. Over in the Wall Street Journal, Paul Aiken of the same group claims it is illegal to have the machine read out loud, an infringement of Copyright law. I think we saw something similar with the SFWA Takedowns, where the leadership of a writers organization attempted to bite the hand that feeds it. And just like the last time, a whole lot of the authors they represent disagree. John Scalzi scoffs at the thought that a computer generated voice could match the quality of a human rendition, saying Yes, one is free and the other isn’t, but you do get what you pay for. Cory Doctorow points out that one part of the legal argument would end up concluding that email, web-browsers, computers, photocopiers, cameras, and typewriters are all illegal, too. Neil Gaiman points out that when you buy a book, you also buy the right’s to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend…, and that this is the same sort of thing. And yes, I know I exceeded 25 words on the Gaiman quote, but his writings don’t lead me to believe he is the kind of person to sue me for plagiarism for supporting his opinion in public (since we are on a copyright topic, I thought I should mention that). Wil Wheaton brought Scalzi’s argument firmly home in his own post on the topic, with a downloadable MP3 of him reading a segment of text, followed by his computer reading the same passages. Since he was reading from a book he wrote, no one can give him any copyright grief either. So, the question is, what planet are the leadership of the Author’s Guild living on?