kindle and audio rights

[Alicia Henn]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/opinion/25blount.html?th&emc=th

This is an interesting article on the Authors Guild's attempt to get
authors paid audio rights for Kindle's ability to read aloud. Is it
really read aloud if it isn't read by a human?

Alicia

[Dave Henn]

An interesting question. My initial impression is that having your device read your book aloud is no different than having a friend read it to you. That seems like a fair use of the product that you have purchased.

When one purchases an audio version of the book, one usually receives more value than simple reading aloud. Well, most of the time. Some paid readers are pretty damn annoying. But when you get someone like George Guidall reading, wow, what an addition to the story! Voice characterizations, accents, execellent inflection, these are all things one generally gets from an audio version of a book. Machines might be able to get the inflections right, but it's going to be a while before they're able to add the rest of these things.

Now to color my initial impressions with Blount's article. First, wow! That was one of the best written newspaper pices I have read in a long time. It's almost an essay, though it's been so long since I've read or written one, my specs on essays are a but rusty.

Blount addresses some of my initial concerns, underscoring that audio performances of a non-commercial nature by, for example, parents reading bed time stories are not the target of the Guild. However, there is nothing preventing the Guild from changing their mind on that point, unless we save Blount's statement in an unofficial capacity and try to use it as a defense should the Guild sue such a parent.

Blount indicates that the machine voices closely approach human subtleties in reading. However, as I pointed out, most audio versions have more than someone reading you the story, so there is a much better justification for receiving royalties on them. Plus, even the ones that aren't are specifically prepared and marketed as audio versions of existing titles. And this is where I start to agree with Blount.

Blount's strongest point, in my opinion (non-legal opinion, simply personal opinion, so this is not legal advice - any of it), is that Kindle 2 is being marketed specifically for its ability to read in a pleasing manner. Thus, the reading aloud is a major selling point, or at least Amazon hopes it is, and people might be buying the device just for this purpose. I could see someone not wanting to subscribe to Audible.com for financial reasons looking at the Kindle 2 and saying, "Hey, you know, the voice actors add a lot, but I'm saving ten bucks if I only get one Kindle title a month." So, Audible (or other audio version sellers, even Amazon) loses a sale of an audio version because of the Kindle 2, and the authors don't get paid ther royalty. That is what we call damage.

The conclusion I reach in this long-winded post is that Blount actually has a strong argument. In fact, I partly hope the Guild wins. My reason for partial hope of success as opposed to full-bore hope of success is that I don't want the Guild coming after me for having my Mac read me something or for reading something to a friend or child. Yes, one can assert fair use as a defense, and the Courts might not take kindly to such a suit, but one still has to get into a legal battle to assert the defense, and that takes time and, ahem, money if it goes beyond the threatening letter stage. Thus begins the slide down the slippery slope.

Again, the contents of this post reflect the poster's personal opinion and should not be taken as legal advice.

David Henn

--
Dave Henn
Dave...@Gmail.com

[Eric Scoles]

That's a great question. I don't really know what the Kindle 2 audio experience is like, but there's no way in hell it comes close to the Roy Blount Jr. Experience. I'm guessing (anybody played with one?) that it's on par w/ MacInTalk. Maybe a little smoother, but still lacking the kinds of inflection and stress points that a skilled human reader can impart. (It must be lacking those, because there's nothing to tell it where to put them.) I find it hard to listen to MacInTalk for long stretches because the lack of human cadence and ad hoc inflection makes me have to work harder for meaning. Probably I'd adapt after a while -- but I don't really want to. Why bother when I can read?

On the other hand, it does seem to me that it's a harbinger of things to come. For a few years now I've been expecting the advent of a sort of automated podcast: Blog posts or articles that had been marked-up for automated readers. You could do it with xhtml+css, even -- no need for a new markup language. You'd be able to subscribe to feeds of marked-up text (thus very compact and trivially fast to transfer to your device) that would be interpreted on the fly. It would take some work by patient people to craft ways of describing speech, but the basic work was all done by linguists and phonologists years ago -- it "just" needs to be ported.

It wouldn't be a skilled reader's performance (like Peter Riegert did for Yiddish Policeman's Union), and it could well be markedly duller than most people's ordinary speech, even, but it would overcome the key problem of emphasis and cadence in the reading. MacInTalk doesn't know where to place emphasis, and can't change pitch to reflect new characters, and can't do regional or ethnic accents. But a markup-aware MacInTalk could. (Well, maybe not the accents. Not in version 1.)

This isn't a hardware issue, by the way: We're talking vector, not bitmap, here, so the memory and processor requirements actually shouldn't be much more than current text-to-speech interpreters. Think of the difference between MIDI and MP3 -- this would be analogous to sending a MIDI file with more instructions in it. Doesn't take any more processing power to change timbre, say, because that's just altering a parameter on something the software is already doing, anyway.

So while Kindle 2 probably isn't going to break the audiobook market, its software upgrades will probably start to.  But it will be a while before it has an impact on Roy's sales of audiobooks. (I give him credit, though, for giving a crap about people who don't have his built-in advantage.)

--
eric scoles (esc...@antikoan.com)

[Dave Henn]

ACK! Typos! What happened to automatic spell.... Ah, it's not automatic in Gmail, apparently. Well, please forgive me for the misspellings of "excellent" (execellent), "pieces" (pices), and "their" (ther). I no longer trust Gmail to hold my hand and will have to proofread from now on. :-(

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 8:38 AM, Dave Henn <dave...@gmail.com> wrote:

An interesting question. My initial impression is that having your device read your book aloud is no different than having a friend read it to you. That seems like a fair use of the product that you have purchased.

[snipped for the sake of post length]
--
Dave Henn
Dave...@Gmail.com

[Dave Henn]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 8:41 AM, Eric Scoles <erics...@gmail.com> wrote:

[snip]

On the other hand, it does seem to me that it's a harbinger of things to come. For a few years now I've been expecting the advent of a sort of automated podcast: Blog posts or articles that had been marked-up for automated readers. You could do it with xhtml+css, even -- no need for a new markup language. You'd be able to subscribe to feeds of marked-up text (thus very compact and trivially fast to transfer to your device) that would be interpreted on the fly. It would take some work by patient people to craft ways of describing speech, but the basic work was all done by linguists and phonologists years ago -- it "just" needs to be ported.

[snip]

The automated podcast has been attempted at least once, and years ago. And of all types - it was an intellectual property law podcast using one of the OS-genre text-to-speech systems. It was awful, and it even used text specifically prepared for it. I couldn't listen to it for more than a couple of minutes. Of course, using a better system would improve that quite a bit, and many improvements have been made in even the OS powered systems since the podcast was done (I think it was 2003 or 2004). It's very likely that there another, more listenable, automated podcast out there now.

--
Dave Henn
Dave...@Gmail.com

[Eric Scoles]

On 2009-02-25, Dave Henn <dave...@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Now to color my initial impressions with Blount's article. First, wow! That was one of the best written newspaper pices I have read in a long time. It's almost an essay, though it's been so long since I've read or written one, my specs on essays are a but rusty.

So I guess maybe you're not familiar with Roy Blount ;-).

As I alluded, he's got a serious advantage in audio sales because there's just no way an automated reader is going to sound like him for a bunch of generations. Catch him on "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" sometime and you'll see what I mean. Kind of Tom Bodet-ish, but with a much more distinctive delivery. (And cornier.)


 

--
eric scoles (esc...@antikoan.com)

[Eric Scoles]

On 2009-02-25, Dave Henn <dave...@gmail.com> wrote:

The automated podcast has been attempted at least once, and years ago. And of all types - it was an intellectual property law podcast using one of the OS-genre text-to-speech systems. It was awful, and it even used text specifically prepared for it. I couldn't listen to it for more than a couple of minutes. Of course, using a better system would improve that quite a bit, and many improvements have been made in even the OS powered systems since the podcast was done (I think it was 2003 or 2004). It's very likely that there another, more listenable, automated podcast out there now.

If I undestand correctly what you're describing, this would not be that. Sounds like what you describe is a matter of piping text through MacInTalk, or something like that, and saving it as MP3. Plus, they wouldn't have any inflection, as we both noted, so it would be hard to listen to -- especially for something like that, where you need to understand all of it.

I do think that might be an interim step, though: People podcasting by having their posts automatically baked into MP3 and posted to the web. I would expect that to be a transitional phase, though, until sophisticated automated readers got more market penetration.

All my speculations are purely divorced from the IP aspects of it, of course. On the IP level, I still am not sure what to think of it. I think I probably favor a broader reading of Fair Use than is currently accepted. It's my mis-spent Libertarian youth coming back to haunt me.

--
eric scoles (esc...@antikoan.com)

[Jason Olshefsky]

I think Blount got it right early on: "quixotic". I think the wiser
choice would be to target licensing: that an individual receives a
license for use of a particular work. Draconian licenses are foolish
and will eventually result in your industry collapsing when something
better comes along. As such, I'd argue for the Authors Guild to work
toward a license for text representation with primitive formatting
(i.e. sentences and paragraphs, not illustrations and stylized
presentation) for the Kindle and technologies like it. For it's just
as valid to argue that changing the text size or typeface results in a
different presentation -- and therefore a "new" version that should be
separately purchased.

On Feb 25, 8:41 am, Eric Scoles <ericsco...@gmail.com> wrote:
> ... Think of the difference

> between MIDI and MP3 -- this would be analogous to sending a MIDI file with
> more instructions in it. Doesn't take any more processing
> power to change timbre, say, because that's just altering a parameter
> on something the software is already doing, anyway.

As far as I know, the technologies are not all that different. MP3 is
kind of like musical instructions to play particular cilia in your
ears to simulate the aural experience -- something that could be done
with a modified version of MIDI.

That said, I think it's reasonable to have a separate license for a
performance by a particular reader: human or machine. If Kindle's
reader is just reading the plain text, then it falls under the plain
text license I mentioned above. If it encodes additional information
beyond plain text, then it's a performance that deserves a different
license.

---Jason Olshefsky

[Dave Henn]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 8:59 AM, Eric Scoles <erics...@gmail.com> wrote:

[snip]

If I undestand correctly what you're describing, this would not be that. Sounds like what you describe is a matter of piping text through MacInTalk, or something like that, and saving it as MP3. Plus, they wouldn't have any inflection, as we both noted, so it would be hard to listen to -- especially for something like that, where you need to understand all of it.

[snip]

The thing is, the types of cues you suggest inserting are already part of the speech systems. The creators use all sorts of contextual signals and such to change inflection in the synthesized voice. True, this is not so good to date, but it's getting better. So, while inserting XML cues and such might help, it's sort of superfluous with the types of systems of which I know. 

[snip]

All my speculations are purely divorced from the IP aspects of it, of course. On the IP level, I still am not sure what to think of it. I think I probably favor a broader reading of Fair Use than is currently accepted. It's my mis-spent Libertarian youth coming back to haunt me.

[snip]

Keep in mind that fair use is a defense to copyright infringement, not a right. This is something that is generally not understood by the non-copyright folks (read 98% or more of the world) You still infringe the copyright and can be sued. You just say that what you did does not warrant any sort of compensation to the copyright holder.

I would love to see specific grants of rights for people to read to each other in non-commercial contexts, such as in the car, at bed time, in book clubs, and the like. Specific grants of rights have to be codified into statute or granted by the copyright holders, such as in a notice in the work (hint, hint). However, I think Blount has me convinced that the Guild has a case and that authors will lose out from Kindle's strongly marketed text-to-speech ability.
--
Dave Henn
Dave...@Gmail.com

[Dave Henn]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 9:00 AM, Jason Olshefsky <google.jo@jayceland.com> wrote:

[snip]

That said, I think it's reasonable to have a separate license for a
performance by a particular reader: human or machine.  If Kindle's
reader is just reading the plain text, then it falls under the plain
text license I mentioned above.  If it encodes additional information
beyond plain text, then it's a performance that deserves a different
license.

[snip]

I was with you before reading the entire article and considering Blount's points. The strongest point, that he made implicitly, is that authors will lose royalties from audio versions of the text because the Kindle is being specifically marketed for its relatively pleasant text-to-speech function, and readers/listeners are more likely to purchase Kindle versions that can be both read and spoken rather than purchase audio versions.

So, an additional question is whether the argument would be valid if Amazon weren't marketing the feature so heavily. I would say the argument is still valid if it became well known that the feature was there, but the argument is not as strong.

Yet another questions is whether operating systems will get good enough at text-to-speech that audio version sales suffer. This one is thornier, in my eyes (OUCH). It will have to wait for another day since I'm already behind schedule and need to get at least 10 billable hours in today. :-|

--
Dave Henn
Dave...@Gmail.com

[Dave Henn]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 9:07 AM, Dave Henn <dave...@gmail.com> wrote:

[snip]
Keep in mind that fair use is a defense to copyright infringement, not a right. This is something that is generally not understood by the non-copyright folks (read 98% or more of the world) You still infringe the copyright and can be sued. You just say that what you did does not warrant any sort of compensation to the copyright holder.

[snip]

OK, my memory for copyright is not perfect. The statute actually says that fair use is not an infringement. However, it is still a defense one asserts having been accused of infringement, and there is an involved test to show it. And the factors in the test are fuzzy. Basically, if you're relying on fair use, be really sure it really is a fair use so you can convince a copyright holder that they shouldn't take you to court. (NOT LEGAL ADVICE - PERSONAL OPINION)

Wikipedia has a good entry on Fair Use.

--
Dave Henn
Dave...@Gmail.com

[Eric Scoles]

On 2009-02-25, Dave Henn <dave...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 8:59 AM, Eric Scoles <erics...@gmail.com> wrote:

[snip]

If I undestand correctly what you're describing, this would not be that. Sounds like what you describe is a matter of piping text through MacInTalk, or something like that, and saving it as MP3. Plus, they wouldn't have any inflection, as we both noted, so it would be hard to listen to -- especially for something like that, where you need to understand all of it.

I don't think we're talking about the same "cues."

Yes, there are periods and commas and paragraphs and quotation marks, and you can code a text-to-speech system to account for that. (MacInTalk does.) But that's a long way from Roy Blount, Jr. Or Tom Bodet. Or Peter Riegert. Imagine Sarah Vowell read by a text to speech system. OK, bad example: some people would prefer that, I know. How about David Sedaris? 

Consider Blount's point about the accent: IBM has coded that into their voice tree systems, possibly using his own southern accent as one model. I've listened to accented text to speech voices, and they're not terrible. But you'd have to know to use them, and there's no cue in plaintext for that. There's also no cue for gender, pitch, timbre, tone, or, really, cadence. 

 

[snip]
All my speculations are purely divorced from the IP aspects of it, of course. On the IP level, I still am not sure what to think of it. I think I probably favor a broader reading of Fair Use than is currently accepted. It's my mis-spent Libertarian youth coming back to haunt me.

[snip]

Keep in mind that fair use is a defense to copyright infringement, not a right. This is something that is generally not understood by the non-copyright folks (read 98% or more of the world) You still infringe the copyright and can be sued. You just say that what you did does not warrant any sort of compensation to the copyright holder.

I suspect we risk conflating different domains. I understand that you're talking about law. A good libertarian (even a lapsed one, like me) tends to have some measure of contempt for law. If I think about IP, the law of it interests me only insofar as it drives whether or not I can be sued (to your point); what interests me much more is what "ought" to be, how things could work so that they satisfy my own sense of fairness, and meet what I regard as a pragmatic need to account for how change affects what we are able to do. 

300 years ago, IP law barely (if at all) existed. As I've noted in the past, I'm skeptical about the very concept of IP. I believe, with Jefferson, that there's a tightrope that needs to be walked between protection and restriction: Too little IP protection, and you disincentivise creators; too much, and you disincentivize people from building on the creations of others.
 

I would love to see specific grants of rights for people to read to each other in non-commercial contexts, such as in the car, at bed time, in book clubs, and the like. Specific grants of rights have to be codified into statute or granted by the copyright holders, such as in a notice in the work (hint, hint).

Could you expand on that when you get a minute? I'd like to understand why you couldn't just structure the contract to stiplate the rights. (Or is that what you're saying?) Why do you need statute?

--
eric scoles (esc...@antikoan.com)

[Dana Paxson]

I'd like to insert a question in this great thread: What about the obvious direct utility of text-to-speech for the visually-impaired, not even considering the marketing or the quality of the presentation?  As an author I'd like to realize gain from such presentations from my work, and it seems that Amazon's Kindle steps all over that.

[SteveC]

On Feb 25, 11:12 am, Dana Paxson <dwpax...@acm.org> wrote:
> I'd like to insert a question in this great thread: What about the
> obvious direct utility of text-to-speech for the visually-impaired, not
> even considering the marketing or the quality of the presentation?  As
> an author I'd like to realize gain from such presentations from my work,
> and it seems that Amazon's Kindle steps all over that.

All my book contracts have had clauses that allow license of the work
to the handicapped. That includes large print, Braille, and other
forms. The question then becomes whether this use is an already-
licenced adaptation for the visually handicapped or a form of audio
book, for which a separate license is required.

I doubt that this can be settled without a count intervening.

Steve

[Dave Henn]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 9:48 AM, Eric Scoles <erics...@gmail.com> wrote:

On 2009-02-25, Dave Henn <dave...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 8:59 AM, Eric Scoles <erics...@gmail.com> wrote:

[snip]

If I undestand correctly what you're describing, this would not be that. Sounds like what you describe is a matter of piping text through MacInTalk, or something like that, and saving it as MP3. Plus, they wouldn't have any inflection, as we both noted, so it would be hard to listen to -- especially for something like that, where you need to understand all of it.

I don't think we're talking about the same "cues."

Yes, there are periods and commas and paragraphs and quotation marks, and you can code a text-to-speech system to account for that. (MacInTalk does.) But that's a long way from Roy Blount, Jr. Or Tom Bodet. Or Peter Riegert. Imagine Sarah Vowell read by a text to speech system. OK, bad example: some people would prefer that, I know. How about David Sedaris? 

Consider Blount's point about the accent: IBM has coded that into their voice tree systems, possibly using his own southern accent as one model. I've listened to accented text to speech voices, and they're not terrible. But you'd have to know to use them, and there's no cue in plaintext for that. There's also no cue for gender, pitch, timbre, tone, or, really, cadence. 

 [snip]

I'm only going to reply to this part because it's quick. There are LOTS of other cues before a reader, far more than the individual words and the punctuation. There is the context in which each word is employed, which is dependent in part on the words surrounding it., partly on the words in larger portions of the text being processed. There is the flow of the text in a sentence, it's rhythm, or, as you say, cadence that should be parsable using phonemes and syllabic databases (I'm sure I'm mangling the terminology, but you get the idea). How often have you seen someone or yourself read a passage aloud a second time because the first time didn't sound right? Something cued, or didn't, your change in how you read the passage. All of these things are goals for text-to-speech, and context is already being used in many. I don't know about rhythm, but that shouldn't be long if it's not already there. As far as gender, if a system has a sufficient database of names, it should be able to take a good guess at that, and pitch and timbre would at least partially follow from gender. Tone, I don't know, but context would certainly help there.
--
Dave Henn
Dave...@Gmail.com

[Dave Henn]

As Steve indicates, and Blount stated, many, if not most, publishing contracts grant free use of the work to allow the visually impaired to experience the work. But maybe this charity is outlived? Steve poses an interesting question as to the nature of an audio edition prepared for the visually handicapped. However, the terms of the license grants I've seen at least stronlgy sugggest that such an audio edition would be restricted to distribution to the visually impaired. Once it's in the hands of a visually impaired person, the first sale doctrine might or might not apply. I mean, if there was no actual sale, it begs the question of whether the first sale doctrine could apply.
--
Dave Henn
Dave...@Gmail.com

[delancey]

It's horrible that the author's guild wastes resources on stupidities
like this. Instead of building audience share, they're restricting
distribution in the usual inanely short sighted way. Maybe if we're
lucky next they'll join some lawsuit against VCR recorders or 8-
tracks. Idiots.

What's the difference between a computer reading a text and, say,
using a machine to magnify the text? If I put a book under an Elmo
must I pay for the book a second time, this time for the magnified
version?

This activity is insulting. I sure hope SFWA is not involved.

cd

[SteveC]

It's not a frivolous issue or a shortsighted one. There are pages of
licensing clauses in any book contract, and all can potentially earn
money for the author. Nothing about the advent of new technology says
that authors have to give up all that money without any fight.

My book is available free at Bookshare. (http://www.bookshare.org/
Accessible Books and Periodicals for Readers with Print Disabilities)
I'll be giving a talk to their science fiction group next month. But I
have a signed agreement with them licensing the book for their
readership. I did not intend for the rights to be made generally
available for the taking. Why shouldn't I get to decide that?

The first sale doctrine presumably does not apply due to 17 U.S.C.
section 121 of the Copyright Act that allows designated charitable
organizations to provide copyrighted materials in specialized formats
to qualified people with disabilities. Bookshare could technically
make books available under this clause without license, but they ran
into vocal protest early on in their existence and have gone the
sensible route of getting signed licenses.

Needless to say, Amazon and its readership do not qualify under any
sense of this section. I don't see any reading of section 121 that
would allow Bookshare or its members to pass on those rights.

All that being said, what is the line? What is the current law? I'm
trying to find out from the lawyers in SFWA. I'm not sure there is any
applicable cases, but we'll see.

Unless some law already directly applies, a most unlikely event, a
battle will and should be waged. This isn't the Oklahoma territory.
Those getting there first don't get to decide ownership. Amazon does
not get these rights by default because it has incorporated a certain
bit of technology in its products. Rights are fought over because they
are valuable. A PR campaign is a lot cheaper than a lawsuit and it
makes sense for the Authors Guild to fire a first shot with no cost to
itself.

It's too early for me to have a definitive opinion on this. I'm just
beginning to learn what the issues are. I am leaning toward the
opinion that Amazon took a step too far and took rights that belong to
me just because they could. That creates a precedent that would allow
everyone to take another licensing right from me just because they
could. Why shouldn't I and every writers group fight that? I hardly
consider that stupid or insulting. Maybe in the end I'll come around
to approve this, but the question is supposed to be asked first and
not after a multi-billion dollar corporation grabs the money.

Steve

[Alicia Henn]

>
> What's the difference between a computer reading a text and, say,
> using a machine to magnify the text?

To come back to my first question, what's the difference between a
computer reading a text and a human actor reading a text? One's a
separate work and the other isn't? And to Bount's point that computer
speech is becoming more human-like. The line will only become more
blurred as technology improves.
To take if further and farther, if an avatar on SL dramatizes a work
of mine, is it a separate work? If someone erects a virtual mountain
out of a particularly vivid chunk of my text, sets it on their own SL
island and sells tickets to climb it, can I argue that I own the
rights? Someone else put their effort and artistry, their inflection,
into it. With a computer.

The world is changing and we as spec fic writers should be ahead of
the crowd in exploring what new technologies and media do the the old
lines between print, audio, and everything else.

Alicia

[delancey]

> That creates a precedent that would allow everyone to take
> another licensing right from me just because they could.

Does it? What right is being taken away? The right to ensure that
people don't apply some kinds of algorithms to your work? Which kinds
of algorithms?

And what if I buy my own software to read text and connect it somehow
to my Kindle? Should I send you a check if I feed your book via
Kindle into it?

And flip the precedent argument over: should we pursue every possible
licensing right just because we could? (I strongly believe that if
American public libraries were not started when they were, they'd
never have occurred -- corporate interests and many writers alike
would today decry them as theft if the precedent were not already
established and someone tried to start a public library now.)

> Why shouldn't I and every writers group fight that?

Because a machine is reading it. It's not a performance. There's an
algorithm between the purchased text and the reader/listener.

What's the idea here? When people read the book without any
intervening machinery that's OK, but if they apply some machinery to
it then the author should be paid extra? This is a digital reader --
it's code all the way down, it's all machine. What if I plug a Kindle
into my computer so I can read a book on a bigger screen (whether the
Kindle allows this is irrelevant -- suppose a future version did)?
Should the Guild demand the reader should have to pay again, this time
for bigger font rights? What if Kindle came out with an add-on screen
that was more colorful? Should readers be paying more-colorful-
reading rights? And if not, what's the difference? It's code doing
the major work in all these cases -- whether putting it to a screen or
"reading" it.

Worst case scenario: should all digital books include DRM that
prevents digital readers from being able to (audibly) read them? No
doubt our idiotic guilds will soon ask for this.

The guilds should be trying to find ways to support the long tail, and
ensure narrow distribution and consolidation do not crush the long
tail. Instead, they act like the film industry trying to stop the
VCR. New media defenders have longed observed that anything Jack
Valenti fought for was sure to be the very worst thing for the future
of film and for the relevant forms of creativity; I fear that might
come true of our guilds too.

cd

[Dave Henn]

<cynicism>It's all about the money.</cynicism> Now for the real response.

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 11:51 PM, delancey <dela...@oswego.edu> wrote:

> That creates a precedent that would allow everyone to take
> another licensing right from me just because they could.

Does it?  What right is being taken away?  The right to ensure that
people don't apply some kinds of algorithms to your work?  Which kinds
of algorithms?

And what if I buy my own software to read text and connect it somehow
to my Kindle?  Should I send you a check if I feed your book via
Kindle into it?

 

These examples don't apply to the particular situation Blount addresses. A major factor behind the Guild's effort is that Amazon is specifically marketing the Kindle's ability to read books aloud in a near-human manner. I think that's a nice feature, and, being a user of audio books, I see that buying a Kindle, buying Kindle editions of books, and having the Kindle read them to me while I drive back and forth between Hartford and Rochester would save me a lot of money over my Audible subscription.  If I'm willing to part with the higher quality readers I usually get through my subscription, I would cancel my subscription and stop downloading audio books in favor of the less expensive Kindle-read Kindle editions.

Amazon is effectively, if not actually, trying to compete with the audio book market/sellers. This can lead to lost profits by the audio book makers/sellers and the authors who would have received royalty checks. This is actual financial damage.

Of course, if you don't believe that authors should be compensated for sales of audio editions of books, then that whole scenario is moot. Additional response below.

And flip the precedent argument over:  should we pursue every possible
licensing right just because we could?  (I strongly believe that if
American public libraries were not started when they were, they'd
never have occurred -- corporate interests and many writers alike
would today decry them as theft if the precedent were not already
established and someone tried to start a public library now.)

We probably shouldn't, and you're probably right about libraries.

> Why shouldn't I and every writers group fight that?

Because a machine is reading it.  It's not a performance.  There's an
algorithm between the purchased text and the reader/listener.

So a performance is only a performance if it's done by a human? What about animals? And isn't the human brain of the performer (or animal brain, as the case may be) simply a very sophisticated set of algorithms between the purchased text and the listener? Less abstract response below.

What's the idea here?  When people read the book without any
intervening machinery that's OK, but if they apply some machinery to
it then the author should be paid extra?  This is a digital reader --
it's code all the way down, it's all machine.  What if I plug a Kindle
into my computer so I can read a book on a bigger screen (whether the
Kindle allows this is irrelevant -- suppose a future version did)?
Should the Guild demand the reader should have to pay again, this time
for bigger font rights?  What if Kindle came out with an add-on screen
that was more colorful?  Should readers be paying more-colorful-
reading rights?  And if not, what's the difference?  It's code doing
the major work in all these cases -- whether putting it to a screen or
"reading" it.

OK, what if it were a play? You write a script. Someone buys a copy, feeds it into their computer, and programs very convincing robots/androids to perform the play in a theater down the street from the place where your play is being performed by humans at half the price per ticket with marketing touting the performance as nearly as the human one because of new programs the robots are running. Oh, and the robot performance is just an extra feature - the "main attraction" is the text of your play on display.

First, why should you be compensated for the performance by the humans? After all, you were paid for the copies of the scripts they use, and they are putting hard work into the performance while you sit back and get a check. Why do you get the check? The show is just a different form of the text you wrote, a form that you really have nothing to do with.

Second, if you think you should be paid for human performances of your play, and the robots do it as well as humans or nearly so, why shouldn't you get paid for the performance rights? What if your audiences were suddenly half the size they were before the robot show opened, the people instead going down the street to the robot show? Would that change your mind if you were against payment when you weren't actually seeing money walking down the street?

Such sophisticated robots/androids are still a good time away. However, what about screenplays? Why should a writer of a screenplay receive a dime from movie/ticket sales at all if he/she receives payment for copies of scripts? (I know this probably isn't the way it's done.) And what about home video? But say the writer does receive payment for human performed versions of his/her screenplay (movie/ticket/home video sales and all). What if Pixar or Dreamworks also buys the screenplay and produces it all with computer generated actors and voices, then releases it in a theater near the one where the human performed version is playing and selling tickets for half the price? That is doable now. And some of the computer generated movies are getting very life-like. Should the writer receive payment for this version of the text? Why? It's just software processing the writer's text into speech, descriptions into scenery, and forming and animating the virtual actors.
 

[snip]

I suggest that while one may strongly disagree with the principle behind the Guild's effort, the principle has a reasonably rational basis and so is not any more "idiotic" than generally accepted ideas about copyright and compensation for rights to use a work. Should there even be a copyright in any work? If so, why? Maybe we should do away with copyright altogether and simply rely on contracts alone. This feeds into the discussion Eric wants to have about intellectual property, the law, and you. :-) That last "you" is the figurative "you," not the personal "you."
--
Dave Henn
Dave...@Gmail.com

[Eric Scoles]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 7:14 PM, Dave Henn <dave...@gmail.com> wrote:

....

I'm only going to reply to this part because it's quick. There are LOTS of other cues before a reader, far more than the individual words and the punctuation. There is the context in which each word is employed, which is dependent in part on the words surrounding it., partly on the words in larger portions of the text being processed. There is the flow of the text in a sentence, it's rhythm, or, as you say, cadence that should be parsable using phonemes and syllabic databases (I'm sure I'm mangling the terminology, but you get the idea). How often have you seen someone or yourself read a passage aloud a second time because the first time didn't sound right? Something cued, or didn't, your change in how you read the passage. All of these things are goals for text-to-speech, and context is already being used in many. I don't know about rhythm, but that shouldn't be long if it's not already there. As far as gender, if a system has a sufficient database of names, it should be able to take a good guess at that, and pitch and timbre would at least partially follow from gender. Tone, I don't know, but context would certainly help there.

First: Those are all things that can be inferred, but many of them are choices. Other choices are possible. Those choices are what make a reading a performance.

Second: The value added for a good reading seldom has much to do with those things that are already in the text. It has to do with, yes, the choices that the reader makes in how to interpret or render the stuff that's in the text; but it also has to do with how to render the stuff that's either not in the text (what it makes him/her feel or think, etc.), or that is in the text in ways that no reader will be able to deal with for quite a while. ('Biff's tone oozed. "Oh, but you look wonderful, dear." There was a glint in his eye that I knew well, but Jane did not.') Or consider Rob Sawyer's Kennedy impression in the reading many of us heard him give some months back: Kennedy's not even named in the text, except by implications that only a human would get. Not naming Kennedy has a positive impact on the story-reading experience, because you're allowed to discover who it is that the alien is talking about as you read the words. You could mark that up, though, without having a negative impact on the experience: You discover it by hearing the impression.

Good readings are performances. Performance involves choice. What I'm suggesting is to take the automated reading to a new level -- one analogous to that enabled by MIDI on a good keyboard set, which is absolutely not possible right now or in the truly foreseeable future (i.e., the future that comes before the readers have AI that allows them to interpret the meaning of texts). (To say that it's likely to happen because we've done these things before is not what I mean by 'foreseeable' in this context, because we don't yet have an idea of how it would be done.)

I feel we're speaking at cross-purposes. My broader argument is that there are applications for a speech markup language. The automated reading of blog posts is simply what I see as an early application. This is not something that would take huge research funding to work out -- the markup spec could be mapped out in a weekend by someone familiar with XML specification, critiqued over a period of time. The particulars could be figured out with low-tech by grad students. Hell, I'd be surprised if there hadn't already been Media Lab projects to do exactly this kind of stuff.

At the same time, I'm arguing that plain, un-marked-up text will only be able to approach the automated readabiltiy of marked-up text when the 'reader' has some level of linguistically-capable AI.

What are the implications for performance? If I'm right, it's that the middle will wither. A few really skilled voice performers will make a good deal of money, and then there will be a big absent-middle down to the level of the radio voiceover artist. (Most of the good ones make a decent middle-class living, but that's about it.) I think that's the same thing that happens in the music business: You get super-mega acts, like Britney or Justin, and you get middle-class acts like Steve Earle, and there's not much in between. The same thing will probably happen in publishing (except writers won't make as much money).

--
eric scoles (esc...@antikoan.com)

[Eric Scoles]

On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 2:10 AM, Dave Henn <dave...@gmail.com> wrote:

Maybe we should do away with copyright altogether and simply rely on contracts alone.

FWIW, that's not what I meant by my question. What I meant was, why is [new] statute required, given existing law? Would it not be sufficient to include clauses in new contracts that cover digital reading right?

I realize that doesn't address the question of what to do with existing texts. Is that what you meant by statutory remedies being required?


--
eric scoles (esc...@antikoan.com)

[delancey]

> OK, what if it were a play? You write a script. Someone buys a copy, feeds
> it into their computer, and programs very convincing robots/androids to
> perform the play in a theater down the street from the place where your play
> is being performed by humans at half the price per ticket with marketing
> touting the performance as nearly as the human one because of new programs
> the robots are running. Oh, and the robot performance is just an extra
> feature - the "main attraction" is the text of your play on display.

That's obviously disanalogous, and already covered by the case in
which I put on the play myself. Amazon is not suggesting that they be
allowed to play Kindle "readings" to audiences. Just as I can't play
my netflix DVDs in the local theatre. The purchaser of the book will
have it "read" for herself.

If my home AI puts on a play for me alone I shouldn''t have to pay a
second time. Just as if I act out the play at home or read it aloud
myself I don't have to pay a second time.

Oh, and my prediction was retroactively verified. The Guild:
"Publishers certainly could contractually prohibit Amazon from adding
audio functionality to its e-books without authorization, and Amazon
could comply by adding a software tag that would prohibit its machine
from creating an audio version of a book unless Amazon has acquired
the appropriate rights." There you have it: add DRM to your book
prohibiting it be readable by S-to-T software. And, of course, sue
the S-to-T software companies next to force them to respect this DRM.

I stand by my bitter conviction, and proclaim from the rooftops that
THE AUTHOR GUILD LEADERS ARE IDIOTS if they pursue this.

cd

[Alicia Henn]

That could be the title of the talk if I can find an entertainment
copyright and licensing specialist to give us a talk on fiction IP in
the future:

"Stupid Idiots and their idiotic stupidity"

;-)

[Jason Olshefsky]

The nuances of licensing ...

On Feb 26, 2:10 am, Dave Henn <dave.h...@gmail.com> wrote:
> OK, what if it were a play? You write a script. Someone buys a copy, feeds
> it into their computer, and programs very convincing robots/androids to
> perform the play in a theater down the street from the place where your play
> is being performed by humans at half the price per ticket with marketing
> touting the performance as nearly as the human one because of new programs
> the robots are running. Oh, and the robot performance is just an extra
> feature - the "main attraction" is the text of your play on display.

Is the robot theater a "general purpose play reader" wherein the text
of _any_ play could be fed into it and a performance almost as good as
a human performance would come out? Or is it a theater where the play
must be modified from a pure text-based form -- adding direction,
lighting, scenery, etc?

Regardless, your analogy is flawed in another way: it is a performance
where people _go to_ the theater -- an illegal situation given the
single-user license for a printed play. The Kindle approach is to
sell everyone a theater with robots which can perform any play which
they then have to buy separately. What if it were a box with a Furby
and a talking Barbie and you could feed any script into it and it
would read the play, alternating between the two robots to simulate
dialog? It's essentially a specialized audio reader -- much more
similar to the Kindle.

As an individual, it's already within my hobbyist grasp to create my
own Kindle with text books: I could cut the spine off, feed it into my
scanner, use optical character recognition (OCR) to convert it to
text, then feed it through a fancy text-to-speech algorithm and listen
to it on my iPod. As long as such a path exists and is legal, then I
can't see how the Kindle changes that.

I think your argument is that audio books and printed books create
separate revenue opportunities to the author. However, if you dig
down to the consumer, are there really that many people who buy a
printed book then also buy the audio book? If they only buy one or
the other, then you might entice _more_ consumers if you offer them
both at once -- even though they will likely use only one version _or_
the other most of the time. To charge them for an audio book they
won't use, or to charge them for a printed book they don't plan to use
will only infuriate them.

---Jason Olshefsky

[Eric Scoles]

On 2009-02-26, Jason Olshefsky <google.jo@jayceland.com> wrote:

... What if it were a box with a Furby

and a talking Barbie and you could feed any script into it and it
would read the play, alternating between the two robots to simulate

dialog?  ...

Surprisingly (and sadly, I feel compelled to say), googling "furby barbie text to speech" returns no hits in the first two pages that seem to encompass this scenario.



--
eric scoles (esc...@antikoan.com)

[delancey]

Yeah, maybe I shouldn't say "idiots". "The Craven Depraved and their
Depraved Craven Acts"? "Foot Shooters and the Feet they Shoot"?
"Reactionary Fools and their Foolish Reactions"?

[Dave Henn]

On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 7:01 AM, delancey <dela...@oswego.edu> wrote:

 

I stand by my bitter conviction, and proclaim from the rooftops that

THE AUTHOR GUILD LEADERS ARE IDIOTS if they pursue this.

I promise I'll respond to your points eventually. Time is short. I take issue with your repeated use of "idiotic" and "idiot" to characterize a group with whom you disagree. Perhaps I am also an idiot because I disagree with you? If so, then you must be an idiot because you disagree with me. And don't use any of that philsophy whammy stuff to pick apart this post, mister - we's jus' simple folk who don' unnerstan' them big werds.
--
Dave Henn
Dave...@Gmail.com

[Dave Henn]

On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 8:30 AM, delancey <dela...@oswego.edu> wrote:

Yeah, maybe I shouldn't say "idiots".  "The Craven Depraved and their
Depraved Craven Acts"?  "Foot Shooters and the Feet they Shoot"?
"Reactionary Fools and their Foolish Reactions"?

All of which are ad hominem attacks on the Guild and, by association, those who agree with them.


--
Dave Henn
Dave...@Gmail.com

[Eric Scoles]

On 2009-02-26, Eric Scoles <erics...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 7:14 PM, Dave Henn <dave...@gmail.com> wrote:

....

I'm only going to reply to this part because it's quick. There are LOTS of other cues before a reader, far more than the individual words and the punctuation. There is the context in which each word is employed, which is dependent in part on the words surrounding it., partly on the words in larger portions of the text being processed. There is the flow of the text in a sentence, it's rhythm, or, as you say, cadence that should be parsable using phonemes and syllabic databases (I'm sure I'm mangling the terminology, but you get the idea). How often have you seen someone or yourself read a passage aloud a second time because the first time didn't sound right? Something cued, or didn't, your change in how you read the passage. All of these things are goals for text-to-speech, and context is already being used in many. I don't know about rhythm, but that shouldn't be long if it's not already there. As far as gender, if a system has a sufficient database of names, it should be able to take a good guess at that, and pitch and timbre would at least partially follow from gender. Tone, I don't know, but context would certainly help there.

First: Those are all things that can be inferred, but many of them are choices. Other choices are possible. Those choices are what make a reading a performance.

Second: The value added for a good reading seldom has much to do with those things that are already in the text. It has to do with, yes, the choices that the reader makes in how to interpret or render the stuff that's in the text; but it also has to do with how to render the stuff that's either not in the text (what it makes him/her feel or think, etc.), or that is in the text in ways that no reader will be able to deal with for quite a while. ('Biff's tone oozed. "Oh, but you look wonderful, dear." There was a glint in his eye that I knew well, but Jane did not.') Or consider Rob Sawyer's Kennedy impression in the reading many of us heard him give some months back: Kennedy's not even named in the text, except by implications that only a human would get. Not naming Kennedy has a positive impact on the story-reading experience, because you're allowed to discover who it is that the alien is talking about as you read the words. You could mark that up, though, without having a negative impact on the experience: You discover it by hearing the impression.

Good readings are performances. Performance involves choice. What I'm suggesting is to take the automated reading to a new level -- one analogous to that enabled by MIDI on a good keyboard set, which is absolutely not possible right now or in the truly foreseeable future (i.e., the future that comes before the readers have AI that allows them to interpret the meaning of texts). (To say that it's likely to happen because we've done these things before is not what I mean by 'foreseeable' in this context, because we don't yet have an idea of how it would be done.)

I feel we're speaking at cross-purposes. My broader argument is that there are applications for a speech markup language. The automated reading of blog posts is simply what I see as an early application. This is not something that would take huge research funding to work out -- the markup spec could be mapped out in a weekend by someone familiar with XML specification, critiqued over a period of time. The particulars could be figured out with low-tech by grad students. Hell, I'd be surprised if there hadn't already been Media Lab projects to do exactly this kind of stuff.

Apparently there's a long history of this kind of development -- Media Lab seems to have been working on it in the late 90s, and it's apparenlty widely used in voice-response systems (well, of course it would be, wouldn't it?).

Media Lab: "Tools for Expressive Text-To-Speech Markup"
PDF: http://www.media.mit.edu/~erikb/papers/uist01-tools.pdf
Google HTML: http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:NwC4evLvIi0J:www.media.mit.edu/~erikb/papers/uist01-tools.pdf+text+to+speech+markup&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a

W3: Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML):
http://www.w3.org/TR/speech-synthesis/

Wikipedia: Speech synthesis markup languages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_synthesis#Speech_synthesis_markup_languages

Wikipedia: Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_Synthesis_Markup_Language

Wikipedia: Java Speech Markup Language [JSML]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSML

Spoken Text Markup Language [STML]
http://www.bell-labs.com/project/tts/stml.html

SABLE, which apparently attempts to merge STML, JSML and SSML
http://www.bell-labs.com/project/tts/sable.html

All that's needful is for some clever MAKER-type to get obsessed with it.

--
eric scoles (esc...@antikoan.com)

[delancey]

OK, I wish I'd written "infuriatingly counterproductive" in place of
each instance of "idiotic" and other such adjectives.

[delancey]

By which I meant to say, sorry. Sometimes I get excited and write
with my spine. Bad habit. But consider it a sign of me being relaxed
among friends and not thinking too carefully as a result.

[Eric Scoles]

On 2009-02-26, delancey <dela...@oswego.edu> wrote:

OK, I wish I'd written "infuriatingly counterproductive" in place of
each instance of "idiotic" and other such adjectives.

There's also the fine distinction between "the guild are infuriatingly counterproductive" and "the guild's behaviors are infuriatingly counterproductive."

One is, strictly speaking, an ad hominem. The other is a statement about observed behaviors. 

Of course, sometimes we do want to say, directly, that someone seems to be an idiot based on what they've been doing or saying. I try to remember (don't always) to still talk about the behavior: "The guild are behaving like idiots."

I've become convinced it makes a difference. One way of speaking starts from the position that the other party is an idiot (and, maybe, that you're not), whereas the other leaves open the possibility that you can learn something from or about them.

SHIFTING GEARS:

For what it's worth, I think this issue is past due for the Guild's attention, but that they're ill-suited to address it.

Creators of original works have come to have a very privileged legal status in recent centuries. I don't know when the patent and the copyright were invented, but they were invented: They're not basic human rights. (For that matter, neither are 'basic human rights,' but that's another story.) Before some point in the relatively recent past -- I'm going to guess it was during the Englightenment, sometime -- you told a story, it got re-told wherever and whenever someone wanted to re-tell it, however they had the means to do so. LIkely as not it got altered, somehow, in the process. (Literary, and especially poetic, forms came to be in large part to constrain those changes. They were the first document standards, in that way.)

We essentially take the basic position in the modern time that the old times were bad old times in that way -- that people ought to have control over what they create. FWIW, I'm with that program, mostly -- I'm a modern guy. But it's clear to me that we have to be willing and able to deal with change as it comes to us, and that furthermore the fighting of losing battles (which this would surely be) is usually a bad thing for society. Better to find a way that the battle doesn't have to happen. Battles waste resources that could be put to better use elsewhere. (I've long believed that the common received wisdom, that conflict normally leads to better 'product', is a crock. Competition can lead to better product. It does not inherently do so, and when it escalates into certain types and scales of competition, as far as I can see, the result is usually bad. But I digress....)

That the fight to control text-to-speech readings is a losing battle, I see little doubt. I don't dispute that there may well be a legal foundation for the idea that text-to-speech is not permissable use, or at least that Amazon is in violation for providing a means to do that. But as Craig, I, and Jason have pointed out, getting the text into speech borders on trivially easy. So it becomes both an unenforceable and absurd restriction. (I say 'absurd', because we have a pretend-difference, where we let it happen 'for the handicapped', but not for general use: So you could build a Kindle 2 that was sold only to the visualy impaired [or to people who can't read, for that matter], and that would be allowed, but you couldn't sell it to the general public. It would be the over-zealous protection of property rights re-inforcing the Nanny State.)


 

--
eric scoles (esc...@antikoan.com)

[Jonathan Sherwood]

Patents are (in theory anyway) designed to foster innovation. Who would create something new if it would simply be stolen away the moment it was made? Likewise, why would a publisher put the time and effort into publishing a book if the second it was seen to be a success, every other publisher would republish it?

But we're entering a new era where digital goods are not adhering to old theories. Look at the innovations coming out of open-sourced software. No patents at all, yet the software is often better than anything available commercially. That's not supposed to happen. Or the author David pointed out who gave away his entire book, and then got a book deal and landed on the NY Times list. That's not supposed to happen either.

I think I have to agree with Eric that whatever the principles involved, the fight over text-to-speech rights is a losing battle. Change is coming, and business models will have to change as well.

--
Jonathan Sherwood
Sr. Science & Technology Press Officer
University of Rochester
585-273-4726

[Dana Paxson]

What a wild thread this is!  But it hits at a huge problem any artist or creator has to face: How do I get an appropriate reward for my creative efforts?  I can't fault the Guild, or anyone else, for trying to find answers to this.  We depend on the answers for some kind of livelihood for ourselves, and if we can't make our way while producing something of value, the world is the poorer too.

I don't think the answers lie deep in the plies of technology or behavior.  Do we honor our creators sufficiently that they hold recognized status and compensation in our society?  I don't think we do.  Henry Miller wrote that America drives its artists mad, and I agree with that, because I've seen personally what artists have to do to produce their art and live by it.  My sister, a producer of gorgeous prints, drawings, paintings, collages, and decorated objects, doesn't earn s**t from her work.  She goes at it full-time, too, and has had to live with our mom until this past year, when Mom died.

Then there's my buddy Larry Stark, who is a printmaker and digital photographer, and who has barely been able to raise a family on the prodigious efforts he's put forth all his life (he's 67 now, I think).  These stories are legion: artists, writers, musicians, inventors, all suffer from the same affliction: the moment the created work issues forth, it becomes someone else's property, and then bidding wars start over the best ones, and the creator gets little or nothing.  We read the headlines who make millions, but for every headliner there are a million poor, all creating what makes our world beautiful, safe, harmonious, and vital.

I've believed, too, that business models have to change; but maybe it's more than that.  Maybe it's our overall societal model that must change, to make business a less-dominant component of what we truly need.  The opportunity presented by digital access is the direct exposure of the creator to the beneficiaries of her/his creations.  That exposure can force attention where it should be, but how to get compensation to the creator is a topic too big for what I can imagine right now.

Dana

[SteveC]

On Feb 26, 11:57 am, Dana Paxson <dwpax...@acm.org> wrote:
> What a wild thread this is!  But it hits at a huge problem any artist or
> creator has to face: How do I get an appropriate reward for my creative
> efforts?

Yep.

But I'm going to throw in another huge topic. The future. Ever since
the 19th century spawned a whole literature of future utopias people
have argued, sometimes convincingly, sometimes not, for running the
world in a fundamentally different way than the present. (They got
this, just as writers always have, from the morning headlines,
specifically discussions of Communism and Socialism replacing
Capitalism, but I'm going to ignore that.)

The one thing that Utopians and their successors always left out was
the messy transition. How did a society, with society's massive
inertia and legacy problems, change over from the present day to the
future that presumed universal change down to its very roots?

You see this in current arguments from those who want to get rid of
our suburban sprawl and replace it with tight-knit cities dependent on
mass transit. How do you get there from here? How do you compensate
the 60% of America whose current choices would be devalued by removing
cars from the equation?

The world in which the argument technology exists and everybody has to
let it roll over them is like those. In a future world content will be
produced in a different payment model than today. It can't be expected
that those who developed their business plans for the current business
model will abruptly drop the any more than Microsoft has dropped all
its DOS from the OS I'm using, no matter how much theoretical sense
such a change might make.

Nor are other industries' transitions proof that technology triumphs
over all. Imusic is a better business model than Napster. Hulu makes
more money than YouTube. People will pay for content, if the price is
right and the delivery mechanism is right. Taking and putting it out
for free has changed industries but hasn't broken them, because
content has value. Content owners will fight for that value and find
acceptable ways to extract payments.

It's not that fight that is self-defeating, it's the taking for free
fight that is. People will strike back when their possessions are
stolen. In the long run, even on the Internet, the thieves have been
the ones to lose.

The future of books will be different. The transition will be messy.
The result will be a compromise in ways that probably no one is
predicting. What I guarantee it won't be is what would happen if you
wiped the slate clean (what a hoary obsolete cliché that is - and yet
we still understand it!) and created the new system from scratch.

Steve

[delancey]

> It can't be expected
> that those who developed their business plans for the current business
> model will abruptly drop the any more than Microsoft has dropped all
> its DOS from the OS I'm using, no matter how much theoretical sense
> such a change might make.

The Guild is not considering defending an existing business. The
situations are not analogous. They're considering trying to create a
new restriction: the power to prevent people from using algorithms to
produce speech for personal use from a legally purchased copy of a
book.

cd

[Eric Scoles]

On 2009-02-26, SteveC <Steve...@cs.com> wrote:

On Feb 26, 11:57 am, Dana Paxson <dwpax...@acm.org> wrote:
> What a wild thread this is!  But it hits at a huge problem any artist or
> creator has to face: How do I get an appropriate reward for my creative
> efforts?


Yep.

But I'm going to throw in another huge topic. The future. Ever since
the 19th century spawned a whole literature of future utopias people
have argued, sometimes convincingly, sometimes not, for running the
world in a fundamentally different way than the present. (They got
this, just as writers always have, from the morning headlines,
specifically discussions of Communism and Socialism replacing
Capitalism, but I'm going to ignore that.)

The one thing that Utopians and their successors always left out was
the messy transition. How did a society, with society's massive
inertia and legacy problems, change over from the present day to the
future that presumed universal change down to its very roots?

To be fair, a lot of distopians left that stuff out, too. By which I mean they understimate our ability to muddle through and put up with crap. Which is one of the things that's so beutiful about the original cyberpunk visions and their spiritual/literary antecedents (I think of Delaney as one, for example): Their world is one of gradual, not wholesale, transitions. It takes account of the fact that there are still people out there using party line phones and heating their homes with non-trendy old-style woodstoves. (Not even getting into what life's like in Lagos or the Favelas of Brazil.)

 

You see this in current arguments from those who want to get rid of
our suburban sprawl and replace it with tight-knit cities dependent on
mass transit. How do you get there from here? How do you compensate
the 60% of America whose current choices would be devalued by removing
cars from the equation?

People who love trains are really attached to their trains.

I've found it's not a good idea to point this kind of thing out around idealists, because they'll just peg you as an anti-visionary, a dream-killer, and you lose the ability to continue to engage with them.

Ever talk with anyone about the Charlotte trolley? I knew one of the guys who was initially pushing that. He insisted they could get it running again for $500K. This was the same guy who said they could turn the HoJack into a restaurant for $200K. So some of this is just self-deludedness. I find it hard to sort out where that ends and where the structural misunderstanding begins.

 

The world in which the argument technology exists and everybody has to
let it roll over them is like those. In a future world content will be
produced in a different payment model than today. It can't be expected
that those who developed their business plans for the current business
model will abruptly drop the any more than Microsoft has dropped all
its DOS from the OS I'm using, no matter how much theoretical sense
such a change might make.

And why: that's important! The "why" isn't technical (and I suspect you'd agree), it's social. (I don't actually think it's even economic, at least not primarily. But that would be another discussion for another time.)
 

Nor are other industries' transitions proof that technology triumphs
over all.

Amen. Technological solutions as such hardly ever do well. I'm writing this backward, so "the street puts technology to its own uses" is a sentiment applicable to both this and to what I've just written and you haven't read yet.
 

Imusic is a better business model than Napster. Hulu makes
more money than YouTube. People will pay for content, if the price is
right and the delivery mechanism is right. Taking and putting it out
for free has changed industries but hasn't broken them, because
content has value. Content owners will fight for that value and find
acceptable ways to extract payments.

As they do every day. But the deth knell of "free content" has been sounded prematurely so many times that I have a hard time crediting it, whoever is predicting it. Back in the late '90s, everyone who thought they were clever was preducting the iminent demise of online advertising. But it's still there and stronger than ever. "Banner ads don't work," they cried -- but they actually did, even as everyone claimed they didn't. Gawker Media's whole business model is predicated on advertising, and they're doing quite well, thank you.

As for margins: I don't actually know precisely what the margins are, right now, but I do have the sense that they're small. I also know that big media firms make nice revenue streams off online advertising. (Margins are so narrow at the low end of the food chain that my company has a hard time making money off it online ads we get our clients into them. We have to approach it as a strategic need and justify it that way. Need fierce economies of scale or really low overhead, preferably both -- but then, that's what technology is good for: Improving your economies of scale and reducing your overhead.)
 

It's not that fight that is self-defeating, it's the taking for free
fight that is. People will strike back when their possessions are
stolen. In the long run, even on the Internet, the thieves have been
the ones to lose.

So who are the "thieves"? Do you take the view espoused by many on the commercial side that any attempt to subvert systems of commerce is theft? I'm assuming not. Just pirates? Or Amazon, too? Point being: "Thief" is a strong word with strong connotations, and it means very different things to people in different parts of this very large debate. A less value-laden and more precise term might be helpful. 

To be fair, "taking for free" is not really the model that most thinkers in this space are interested in. "Giving for free", is. E.g., if you make your work available for free (as you've done), that's "giving for free." Most of the people who have really radical stuff to say about what form publishing (of anything) is going to take, think that it's the "giving" model that matters. The "taking" model -- theft, piracy, whatever you want to call it -- is simply something that makes the "giving" model more effective.

As for fighting back when their possessions are stolen: When we move into the digital realm, the concept of "possessions" becomes very problematic, because it's possible to create infinite copies of a "possession" without degradation in quality. I'd argue that it's even possible to make a very large number of copies without degradation in value. It all depends on two factors:

How value is measured: Do you measure it in purchase revenue, or in terms of implicit revenue? (See following.)

How value is realized: The argument in favor of the "giving" model has always been that it generates ancillary business. That business may be in the form of sales -- Cory Doctorow and Charlie Stross both argue that they've probably realized sales increases due to free-giving -- but more likely it's in the value of opportunities you'd not have, or woudl have fewer of, without having your product out there. It's a really old idea. Old forms I can cite include the free distribution of Book of Mormon or Gideon Bibles, or the free or at cost distribution of books as a means to promote the services of an expert or products of a company. (See this in software all the time. I can turn around and look at a cheap copy of Luke Wroblewski's Site-Seeing that I got as a gimme for a seminar I went to last year, and I have a couple of Seth Godin books I've picked up that way. Seth's kind of the poster-child for this kind of stuff, really.)

 

The future of books will be different. The transition will be messy.
The result will be a compromise in ways that probably no one is
predicting. What I guarantee it won't be is what would happen if you
wiped the slate clean (what a hoary obsolete cliché that is - and yet
we still understand it!) and created the new system from scratch.

On this, I heartily agree. SF writers AFAICS are not very good at accounting for inertia, either social or economic (other futurists are as bad or worse, though, to be fair). One of the attractive things about the cyberpunks was that they seemed to get that a little more right than folks who'd come before. I think it had to do with many of them having more experience in the underclass. I suspect that if you look at the older-line writers who more closely resemble the cyberpunks in that regard (Tom Disch, Samuel Delaney, PKD spring to mind), they're folks who have more experience with street life -- a better vantage to human inertia in action.

--
eric scoles (esc...@antikoan.com)

[Janice Carello]

These last few posts brought up some questions for me: What is an appropriate reward for creative efforts? What makes creative effort more (or less) valuable than other types of effort? Is it true that people will pay for content in the future? What I hear people saying is that technology is helping to shift the balance of power away from the priesthood of publishers who control content and control who makes money on it, and into the hands of  those who create the content. But will people continue to see everything they create as something for which they must demand payment? Or is that belief part of the dying system of intermediaries who also control, to a large extent, what people perceive as valuable and how they should pay homage to it? 

 

My students tell me they don't pay much for music now. They don't have to. And they don't want to.  I can't help but think that a similar thing might happen with "literature" and other texts. Maybe I'm remembering history incorrectly, but wasn't the Gutenberg press revolutionary because it allowed people to spread their ideas, not because it allowed them to sell them? Maybe the value of creative efforts will (have to) be measured in ways other than revenue? Then again, while my students don't pay directly for music, they pay homage by paying good money for concert tickets and merchandise. So maybe it's just that the intermediaries are changing? Or that it's not the content that's valuable, it's something else that we haven't figured out yet?

--
Janice

[Jonathan Sherwood]

Stross had an interesting take on this in Accelerondo. He laid out a world where doing something for money became unfashionable; it was preferable to do something for free and then reap the rewards of the kudos or reputation you received because of it. Essentially, reputation became the new barter-esque currency. If you created something that made airplanes more efficient, the airlines would be happy to fly you for free the next time(s) you asked. Stross' character manages to live almost entirely on the goodwill he creates in others.

In current reality, this just wouldn't work on the large scale, but it might work in certain circumstances. The rock group that gives away its albums and sells out its concerts, or the author who gives away his book via podcast and debuts on the NY Times list. Both of those end up collecting money in some form, but not from the initial creation of the work.

So the idea of a piece of work being valued by a way other than money may be very much upon us.

--
Jonathan Sherwood
Sr. Science & Technology Press Officer
University of Rochester
585-273-4726

[delancey]

I read a very nice book recently arguing that there's a fundamental
tension between the market and art. I recommend it; regardless of
whether we agree with it, it was interesting: The Gift, Lewis Hyde
(http://www.amazon.com/Gift-Creativity-Artist-Modern-Vintage/dp/
0307279502/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1235675364&sr=8-1).

[Janice Carello]

Thanks for the recommendation. I found the title, The Gift, so interesting that I checked out the table of contents. It looks thought-provoking. Eric has talked with me a lot about how gift giving is viewed from an anthropological view: gift giving can be and often is very manipulative since one often gives expecting to receive. It looks like this book explores similar ideas. I added it to my wish list.

--
Janice

[SteveC]

On Feb 26, 2:04 pm, Jonathan Sherwood <jonathan.r.sherw...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Stross had an interesting take on this in Accelerondo. He laid out a world
> where doing something for money became unfashionable; it was preferable to
> do something for free and then reap the rewards of the kudos or reputation
> you received because of it. Essentially, reputation became the new
> barter-esque currency.

Cory Doctorow did the same two years earlier in Down and Out in the
Magic Kingdom. That's how Cory made his name. There was a lot of talk
on the Net at that time or earlier about how important reputations
were becoming and noting that message boards were allowing people to
vote on other people's status and positing all sorts of changes
thereof.

In fact, nothing really changed. Sure, a few authors have become well-
known and even bestselling for marketing themselves on the web with
free content, but a few authors have always stood out because of their
marketing. A few groups have become known for their free music. A few
have become known for their movies. A few have become known for their
blogs. The tools changed but the underlying economic reality still
means that to make money their products get sold in the old-fashioned
way. Google "reputation economy" for discussion of this. Five years
old and already obsolete.

Craig, the Guild is most definitely defending an existing business.
The audio book business is the one part of publishing that's making
money.

Steve

[Janice Carello]

What I'm wondering is if being well-known will matter as much. If there will be more artists who are known to fewer people. My students listen to a lot of musicians who aren't well-known.

--
Janice

[delancey]

> Craig, the Guild is most definitely defending an existing business.
> The audio book business is the one part of publishing that's making
> money.

The audiobook business is very definitely not book owners in their
private homes using algorithms to read a book that they legally
purchased. The two are about as close as using the VCR and attending
a movie theatre, or using a cassette recorder and attending a concert
-- which of course in both cases are examples of devices that the
channel controllers tried to crush.

If the Guild pursues this, they'll be seeking to invent new property
rights, which is what happens again and again in similar cases: the
channel controllers chip away at fair use and pursue ever greater
copyright control by claiming that digital tools are going to put
artists in the poorhouse. The predictions have consistently proven
false -- books are still selling, people still buy music and go to the
movie theatre, people still watch television, people still buy movies,
and audiobooks will continue to sell well -- but certain interests
will succeed in grabbing powers that shrink the cultural commons ever
smaller.

cd

[Eric Scoles]

It's an interesting choice of title -- there's a classic of social theory by the same name:

http://www.amazon.com/Gift-Reason-Exchange-Archaic-Societies/dp/039332043X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1235681369&sr=1-1

This is the book I've talked with Janice about. Hyde would have to be familiar with it. Without reading Hyde, I'm having a bit of a hard time figuring out what connection he's making.

[Eric Scoles]

On 2009-02-26, SteveC <Steve...@cs.com> wrote:

On Feb 26, 2:04 pm, Jonathan Sherwood <jonathan.r.sherw...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Stross had an interesting take on this in Accelerondo. He laid out a world
> where doing something for money became unfashionable; it was preferable to
> do something for free and then reap the rewards of the kudos or reputation
> you received because of it. Essentially, reputation became the new
> barter-esque currency.


Cory Doctorow did the same two years earlier in Down and Out in the
Magic Kingdom. That's how Cory made his name. There was a lot of talk
on the Net at that time or earlier about how important reputations
were becoming and noting that message boards were allowing people to
vote on other people's status and positing all sorts of changes
thereof.

In fact, nothing really changed. Sure, a few authors have become well-
known and even bestselling for marketing themselves on the web with
free content, but a few authors have always stood out because of their
marketing. A few groups have become known for their free music. A few
have become known for their movies. A few have become known for their
blogs. The tools changed but the underlying economic reality still
means that to make money their products get sold in the old-fashioned
way. Google "reputation economy" for discussion of this. Five years
old and already obsolete.

But aren't you doing the same thing you've accused others of doing -- expecting radical change, when what we should really expect is something either incremental or less obvious? Especially considering the time scale involved. It's really not in any way fair to judge an idea based on whether or not it takes over the world in five years (or 20). 

In fact, what Stross and Doctorow were talking about was nothing new, even in that form: It had been talked about in crunchy circles for many years. I first ran into it as a ripe old discussion in Whole Earth Review in the 80s. It's had brief flourescenses into strange and wonderful things like FactSheet 5 (which bloomed from the fertile soil of Mike Gunderloy's well-deserved reputation). More recently, you can see it manifest in online communities -- any well established online community. Metafilter is a good example. But you have to be an ethnographer about it: You can't expect to see it all laid out in neat and orderly Whuffies (Down & Out) or karma points (like they use on Plastic.com).

I say this: If you look for actual financial-system replacements to spring up in the space of a few years to replace economies, you're looking in the wrong place. Reputation economies are real, and they're everywhere, and they've been around since humans have had a concept of reputation. But they very seldom are codified. Where they are, the codified systems often degrade into really nasty, unpleasant situations. Plastic.com, again. (Matt Haughey of Metafilter made a very explicit and conscious decision to avoid codified reputation systems for exactly that reason, but Metafilter is intensly reputation-driven. Since the reputation has to be continually created, and can't be banked or gamed like Plastic Karma points, people have an incentive to behave in a more civil manner with one another than they might in other forums.)

I think that's the thing that folks like Cory D. and Charlie S. and Bruce Sterling (see Distractions for his version) "miss" is that we are not accustomed to commodifying the economics of gift exchange. I well remember the reaction of other undergrads when we read Mauss's The Gift in class. They mostly thought it was a horrible, inhumane concept, gifts entailing obligation! How mean-spirited! Yet it's clear if you think about it that status-seeking via gift exchange is a pretty fundamental human behavior.

That's basically what Reputation Economies are; the gift is service. It's just that we're not used to them being an actual, primary economy. Reputation economies (really, econologies, I would argue) are what keep large criminal organizations rolling along, and they've been a fundamental organizaing principle of every agrarian smallholder society that I've ever had any knowledge of. It happens in business; it happens in churches; it happens on the web; it happens in school classes.

It's everywhere. It's just that in the last 5, 10 or 20 years, nobody's yet cooked up a way to replace our entire economic system with a rationalized Reputation Economy. As though anyone, including Charlie Stross or Cory Doctorow, expected them to.


 

Craig, the Guild is most definitely defending an existing business.
The audio book business is the one part of publishing that's making
money.

It's a harsh truth, but: Sometimes businesses die. There are very few buggy-whip manufacturers anymore, for example.


 

--
eric scoles (esc...@antikoan.com)

[Eric Scoles]

"(really, econologies, I would argue)" ==> "(really, ecologies, I would argue)"


(Really not trying to be THAT clever....)