[free-sklyarov] What is Copyright?

[John Dempsey]

It took me some time to come to the following conclusions:

> the text-to-speech feature is disabled for certain e-books. that may be
> moronic, stupid, short-sighted and customer-unfriendly, but it sure
> isn't ILLEGAL.

Not illegal in any case.  But I think in the true spirit of Copyright Law,
disabling "features" should reduce the governmental protection a work
receives.  But now the rules governing the nature of the delivery of digital
content receiving federal protection are re-written, by the seller, in
whatever flavor.


> if I find a way to make it output speech, that shouldn't be a crime.

Strenuously agreed.  But it is plasuable that removing features from media
eventually removes the copyright protection of the media.  The rules of its
ownership--quite possibly including the right to speech-to-text it--are for
courts and governments to define, not content owners.  I understand the
motivation somewhat of putting the owners in charge of the new and dynamic
digital media forms.  But courts will eventually defend some rights of media
owners for digital media, as they did for all other forms, because at some
point of "feature reduction", ownership isn't ownership anymore.


> I'm absolutely NOT with you if you want a law that requires e-book
> makers to turn on all the features. or if you claim that text-to-speech
> capability is a RIGHT. it's not and claiming that it is will discredit
> your WHOLE argument about anti-circumvention and content control.

Claiming that some rights do exist in the ownership of a piece of media, and
must exist or it's not ownership, could include as a creative assertion that
in the digital world, text-to-speech is a right.  Perhaps it will ultimately
be determined to be a 'feature', available, perhaps, for more pay.  But I
find the idea that it should be a right creatively tenable, and somewhat
illustrative of our movement's values.  Describing "text-to-speech" in
legalese might be the part of a "just" DMCA, enumerating the rights of a
media owner of copyrighted works.

Cheers,

JOhn