The Authors Guild's attack on the Kindle 2

[Commentary] Pressure from the Authors Guild was enough to prompt a capitulation from Amazon, which agreed to turn off the text-to-speech capability unless the author and publisher of a title granted permission. It was an unfortunate concession, because the guild is wrong on all counts. Most fundamentally, there is no such thing as "audio rights" in copyright law. Authors and publishers control the rights to create derivative works, such as audio books, but such works need to be "original works of authorship" preserved in a permanent form. The sounds intoned by the Kindle 2 (or any other text-to-speech program) are neither original nor permanent. Copyright holders also control the rights to performances of their works, but only when they're done in public. That's why, regardless of what publishers might claim in their e-book license agreements, you and your gadgets have the right to read e-books aloud to yourself and your family. And as reviews of the Kindle 2 note, the device's text-to-speech feature is best suited for brief excerpts, not entire works.