Larry Lessig says that when Amazon agreed last week to demands from the Authors Guild that it disable the ability of the new Kindle to read a book aloud it was caving into bullies. And that’s very bad news:
The Authors Guild has objected because Amazon’s Kindle 2 has a function built in that enables the book to be read aloud. So when, for example, you’re commuting, you can plug your Kindle 2 into your MP3 jack and have the book read aloud.
Amazon rightly argued that this did not violate any of the exclusive rights granted by copyright law to the copyright owners. In that, Amazon is exactly right. But nonetheless, it will now enable publishers to decide whether the Kindle books they sell will permit the book to be read aloud. And of course, that includes public domain books.
So here we go again — How long till we can buy Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and be told that this book “cannot be read aloud”?
But the bigger trend here is much more troubling: Innovative technology company (Amazon (Kindle 2), Google (Google Books)) releases new innovative way to access or use content; so-called “representatives” of rights owners, Corleone-like, baselessly insist on a cut; innovative technology company settles with baseless demanders, and we’re all arguably worse off.
Lessig reminds us we have been down this road before. In 2001 Adobe released an e-book reader and gave rights holders the ability to control whether a book could be read aloud.
RELATED: At GigaOm Kevin Kelleher notes that Amazon is about to become almost debt-free. In that it is bucking the economic trend:
…in a market in which companies are in need of new financing and yet unable to find it, Amazon is using cash to escape from debt. Few companies’ operations are that healthy, and the ones that are will likely emerge from the recession much stronger than their peers.