A text transcription follows.
This transcript is for anyone with a hearing impairment or who for any other reason cannot listen to the MP3 audio file.
The following is the text spoken by OUT-LAW journalist Matthew Magee.
Hello and welcome to OUT-LAW Radio, where we hope to keep you up to date with the latest news and the most fascinating features from the world of technology law.
My name is Matthew Magee, and this week we ask: does text to speech technology spell the end for the audiobook?
But first, here the top stories from OUT-LAW.COM, where you can read breaking technology law news throughout the week.
Top EU court says Retirement law doesn't break EU Rules and UK online
and
Ad Body's Guidelines criticised
A UK law which allows companies to force people to retire at 65 or at that company's specified retirement age does not necessarily breach European Union laws, the EU's highest court said today.
The European Court of Justice (ECJ) rejected claims by Heyday, a part of ageing charity Age Concern, that the UK's law breached EU equality regulations.
The ECJ said that the UK can have a law forcing retirement as long as it helps to meet a social policy objective related to employment. It said it was up to the UK's High Court to decide if the law did support a social policy objective.
Employment law expert Selwyn Blyth of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind OUT-LAW.COM, said the Government was likely to win that argument in the High Court.
The trade body for the online advertising industry has produced guidelines for companies to follow to ensure that behavioural advertising does not breach users' rights to privacy. Privacy activists have said the rules do not protect users enough.
Behavioural advertising tracks users' online activity and can target adverts to individual users according to what websites they have visited. Even advertisers concede, though, that the benefit to them of more targeted advertising has to be balanced with the privacy rights of internet users.
The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has published the guidelines, which govern informing users, giving them a choice about behavioural ads and explaining clearly what is going on.
But digital rights body the Open Rights Group (ORG) said that the protections offered by the rules were not good enough for users of the web. It said that user opt outs were not sufficient and that users should not be subjected to surveillance just for the sake of advertising.
Those were some of this week’s top stories from OUT-LAW News.
Computer voice: Dear listener this is a recording of the Amazon Kendle’s text to speech function….
What you are hearing is a piece of technology that could threaten the blooming audiobook industry. Just as people get used to paying for Stephen Fry or Joanna Lumley to read the latest blockbuster to them over their IPod in their plumy tones, Amazon has included a new feature on its Kindle E-book reader that has the book publishing industry crying foul.
The technology? The cranky, blocky-sounding text to speech reader you can hear behind me.
In the second version of Amazon's well regarded e-book reader the Kindle software is included that can read out the text of an e-book. The US Authors' Guild is up in arms, accusing the company of riding roughshod over authors' rights. It claims that the automated reading out of books should attract the same royalty as an actor reading it out on a CD or an MP3.
On this side of the Atlantic, where the Kindle 2 isn't even on sale yet, the response has been slower and more equivocal. After all, text to speech software has been around for years. You could have had anything from your accounts to your favourite web page read to you by your computer back in the 1990s, so is this a new threat? Is it a threat at all?
Copyright law is complicated at the best of times, but introduces a new technology and all you are left with is grey areas and blurred lines. Copyright law expert Kim Walker of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind OUT-LAW.COM, says that someone who gets a machine to read an e-book aloud without the protection of exemptions such as those for disabled people is probably breaking Copyright Law.
Kim Walker: I think under English law it is likely that what Amazon and Amazon’s Kindle is doing is creating an adaptation possibly of the work. In other words because you require the consent of the copyright owner to translate a work or to adapt a work and that includes translating a work and translating doesn’t just include translating into another human language but it can include translating it I guess from print into code that would mean that a machine translating it into spoken word would involve an adaptation. Well we are looking at a literary copyright, it is an infringement of a literary copyright to make an adaptation of the work under section 21 of the Copyright Act 1988 and it seems to me that there is every chance that that is what is happening here.
For years PCs have been able to read out material using text to speech software. Walker said that this, too, is technically a breach of copyright, though not one any industry has got exercised about.
Kim Walker: If you take the copyright work on your home PC and use third party software to reproduce that work audibly I think you are making a copy beyond the rights which you have effectively been granted to use that electronic version of the book. You are probably okay because no one would worry about it, because you have probably paid for the download so no one is losing out economically.
Though the automated reading has been possible on computers for years, publishers and authors' groups in the US are concerned because Amazon's bundling of the software in an e book reader makes it far more likely that it will be used.
Amazon has now bowed to some of the industry pressure, and said that it will allow publishers to bar their titles from being readable by the text to speech software.
It said in a statement that: "Kindle 2's experimental text to speech feature is legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given." But the company has still changed the function so that publishers can block it.
So what does the UK publishing industry think of the technology? Views are mixed and not yet fully formed. Kate Pool works for The Society of Authors, where she advises writers on copyright. She said she believed that software reading out text would qualify as a sound recording under the Copyright Act, and would require a separate license.
Kate Pool: The copyright position is that if you want to make a work available to read or you want a work available to listen you would need permission. You would need, probably, separate permissions for each of those two things. So a device which does both would probably need permission for both forms of use. I do think that if someone is commercially selling a product with that dual function they are effectively are in all but name if not actually in name making that work available both as printed a version and as a sound recording and those are two things which are protected by copyright and would need permission.
The Publishers' Association did not respond to a request for its view on the legality of the technology, and The Audiobook Publishing Association said that it was waiting to consult its members before discussing the situation with the Publishers Association.
The Audiobook Publishing Association's Chair Ali Muirden said that as the owner of an audiobook publishing company, she did feel that the technology could threaten her business.
Ali Muirden: Because obviously if I choose to put out an e book version it then means that anybody could have an audio version if they got the Kindle which would mean that my audio editions may be lose sales so it is a tricky area.
Think, though, of the user of one of these audiobooks. Can this automated voice:
Computer voice: Dear Listener. This is a recording of the Amazon Kindle text to speech….
really compete with a live actor?
Nick Jones thinks not. He runs audiobook publisher Strathmore and he believes that text to speech is not threat yet.
Nick Jones: Certainly we have been aware of text to speech facilities technology and I kind of feel that at the moment it is irrelevant to be honest. I mean, I always say, how do you teach a computer the difference between reading and Reading? And sure enough Kindle can’t cope with that one. It is not an effective substitute for an audio book. I may just be a matter of time but I don’t think we need to worry about it for the next five to 10 years. Also an audio book is not just the text it is the text plus an interpretation plus research into the correct pronunciation of words all that kind of thing.
There is another important question: who commits a copyright infringement, the maker of the device or the listener at home? Amazon could be on the hook, but it is unlikely. Will publishers then really pursue individuals in their homes? The Society of Authors Poole thinks not.
Kate Pool: I can’t see anybody getting particularly heated about it. If it was a single private use I would be surprised if it was going to cause great problems.
It is possible that Amazon has given the audio publishing industry a glimpse of a future filled with automated, as well as human, competition. Publishers don't yet know what that might mean but Jones, for one, thinks that audiobook publishers need to be clearer about the benefits of real actors reading books, and says that claims that text to speech technology infringes author’s rights are not yet worth worrying about.
Nick Jones: I think we’ve got a job in the audio book industry of educating people as to just how much goes into the creation of a good audio book, it is not a mechanical process. I think you might as well try charge parents for reading bedtime stories to their children. I find slightly laughable actually that it has been taken as a serious objection. It seems to be a very selective logical argument in that it applies in the face of common sense.
That's all we have time for this week, thanks for listening.
Why not get in touch with OUT-LAW Radio? Do you know of a technology law story? We'd love to hear from you on RADIO@OUT-LAW.COM. Make sure you tune in next week; for now, goodbye.
OUT-LAW Radio was produced and presented by Matthew Magee for international law firm Pinsent Masons.