Facebook, Kindle, and Intellectual Property

 

Intellectual property rights are hot topics right now. While we writers have always been interested in protecting these types of rights, it came to the public eye because of Facebook’s attempted policy change to “We own all your stuff forever.” As we all know, Facebook has backed down. Score one for intellectual property rights!

 

A similar, although less publicly known issue, is the Kindle’s ability to read a book aloud. Some people have reacted to this ability indignantly, claiming it infringes on their audio book rights. I’m a writer, not a lawyer, so I can’t say legally if this is so. Morally, at the moment, I am standing with Neil Gaiman on the issue: Once you buy the book, you have the right to have it read out loud to you. 
 

What is the difference between a mom reading a book to her child, or the Kindle reading to that same child? Well, other than the emotional bonding and psychological weirdness of a child lying in bed snuggled up to a Kindle. Are we going to start suing librarians who read storybooks to children’s groups? They, presumably, do a much better job of reading it than the synthesized Kindle voice, and would therefore be a much stronger threat to audio books. Reading books aloud happens. It goes with the territory.

 

I understand that audio book makers are threatened, but until synthesized voice technology catches up with real human vocal ability, and the computer brain can interpret the words on a screen in an emotional way, there need be no conflict. My GPS unit still does not know how to pronounce the street “Woodland.” It speaks some form of gobblety-gook instead. If a computer can’t figure out such a simple word, then we are a long, long way from a Kindle reader outstripping a voice actor.

 

We are, as I mentioned in an earlier post, living in an age of media convergence. It is inevitable. We don’t have any objection to people sharing our work with each other in any way they can—we all know this drives sales. We just want to get paid a fair market value for it. These types of “conflicts” are going to arise more and more frequently, and rather than scream that we want technology to remain static, we need to find new ways to protect our rights and create a new vision of what authorship is.

XML and the nature of books in the future

I’m hearing a lot about XML technology, and how it will revolutionize what a “book” is. They talk about the massive amounts of flexibility that it will give to the content of the book. It will provide links from the text to other places on the web, it will allow changes in format of the book, it will allow instant language translation, and so much more. I’m no expert on XML, but apparently it is THE NEXT BIG THING.
 

 

What this means is that publishing is going beyond the printed book—which we all knew. What some of us never considered was having NO printed book, a phenomenon explained well on PersonaNonData.

 

 

So, the real question publishers, agents, and authors need to grapple with is: How does all of this flexibility hit our rights? If you have a technology that can translate it into any language, what does that do to foreign rights? If you can change the format to large print or comic book from the standard print, where does that leave those rights? We are already seeing a dust-up over the Kindle’s voice feature infringing on audio book rights.

 

We are living and writing in an age of convergence—the lines between various media are blurring. Heck, they’re disappearing. The book—the ebook—is becoming a multi-media animal. Reading a book about 1922 Philadelphia, and want to see photos from that era. Just click. Want to hear the music playing in the speakeasy? Just click. Want to read a newspaper article from 1922 mentioned in the book? Just click. It can make for a vastly richer experience for the reader, if they choose to explore.

 

Which brings us to another question. As books become more flexible, how will that change the way authors write? Or will it?

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