I'd previously read, on my Kindle, in the Wall Street Journal, about the Author's Guild's objections to the Kindle2's new text-to-speech feature which allows reading of books to the user.
"They don't have the right to read a book out loud," said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. "That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law."
My immediate thought was that moms and dads all over the world are flagrant abusers of copyright and I couldn't imagine an author objecting to someone reading their book, out loud, in private.
Lots of good arguments have been made about this, from audio book production being well worth paying for, and generated voices - advancing as they have been - are nothing like real voices, to Windows and Macs having this ability for decades and, of course, the existing software for disabled readers, so I need not repeat them. Here's my argument: it took me a few minutes to write this app.
Aiken quote, as read by Microsoft Anna via SayThis: SayThis_Aiken.wav
This was an unintended application created after reading New Kindle Audio Feature Causes a Stir, WSJ, 02/10/2009 and E-Book Rights Alert: Amazon's Kindle 2 Adds "Text to Speech" Function, Author's Guild Blog, 02/12/2009.
SayThis.zip (12kb)