An unnamed reader writes "The command of the Authors Guild has launched a rant in the NY Times about how the Kindle 2 provides Text-to-Speech capabilities that, oh the horror, allow the user to have any text on the Kindle read to her. Roy Blunt, Jr. moans that this is copyright trespass of audio books, and that Kindle users should be forced to pay royalties on audio even though they've already paid for the text version of a book! Amazingly he harps on about how TTS computers has become so good that it may replace humans — and then uses this to argue that it's unfair for Kindle to provide TTS! I think the Authors Guild need a new ministry — someone less of a Luddite, and more acquainted with copyright law." (See also the Guild's official director's similar claims that reading aloud, royalty-free, is an illegal purpose of software.)

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Mark