For reading out loud

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Authors Guild says that it's a breach of copyright to make the Kindle 2 read books out loud. The EFF goes into the legal argument on why this is rubbish, but I'd like to take a simpler, more man-in-the-street approach.

Copyright is a right to prevent other people from redistributing your work. The idea is that people put a lot of effort into creative works, and they should be paid for distributing copies of them. This is good and right.

But once you've sold me a copy of your book, in whatever form, I'm entitled to do whatever I want with it, as long as I don't redistribute copies. I can scribble on the pages; I can picture the characters in my head; I can drink a shot of whiskey whenever the author uses a rude word; I can light my barbecue with it, if I bought a paper copy; and I can use the zip file as a source of randomness for my mathematical experiments, if I bought an electronic copy.

And I can read it aloud to my family. There are restrictions on public performances, because this is easy to enforce and fair - but what I do in my house is not included because that would be a nightmare to enforce and unfair.

Having my Kindle read it to me instead of reading it myself is just another way of accessing the contents. It might make me less inclined to buy an audio book read by some famous movie star, but that's just bad luck. I can have a friend read it to me instead if I want. A Kindle that can read books aloud to me is a handy technological device that makes me more likely to buy more books and support more authors.

A book's author might like everyone to buy their own copies, instead of sharing them around, but that's bad luck. The purpose of copyright is for society's benefit, and society thinks that preventing people from sharing books is a bad thing, and too hard to do anyway. We've been experimenting with technological ways of doing this, and nobody likes them , and they have bad long term consequences for the preservation of works (and people's enjoyment of them) - another societal benefit that has to be traded off against high incomes for authors and voice performers.

Similarly they might like us to buy the audio version as well as the text, but since I have a device that turns the text into audio I don't need to (assuming I'm happy with the quality). Stopping me will involve stopping innovations that make books more useful to people; and encouraging innovations and creativity is a big reason why we invented copyrights and patents.

Bottom line: the Kindle gives me more ways to read books and enjoy them. It makes me more likely to buy them, particularly since I have very limited space to store actual books, but hard drive space is under $1/Gb and dropping. It will increase sales.
And contrariwise, if I see that any authors have invoked their new power to disable the audio reading function on the Kindle, I will certainly make sure I don't buy anything from that author. That's one thing the Authors Guild has no legal power over.