February 26th, 2009

Kindles and "creative machines" blur boundaries of copyright

By Julian Sanchez, Ars Technica

The Authors Guild has come in for a fair amount of ridicule since their executive director, Paul Aiken, claimed that the speech-to-text feature of Amazon's new Kindle 2 violated copyright law, telling the Wall Street Journal: "They don't have the right to read a book out loud"...

Michael Kwun of the Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that it doesn't, for two reasons. First, he says, a "derivative work" must be a work of creative authorship: He cites the copyright statute's definition of "derivative work" as "a work based upon one or more preexisting works . . . which, as a whole, represent[s] an original work of authorship."

Related Issues: Intellectual Property

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