The Drama of Audio Rights

With the Authors Guild getting angry at Amazon's Kindle 2 for read-aloud technology (see their statement), many readers (and writers like Neil Gaiman) are wondering how a robotic-sounding voice reading is an infringement on the rights of a published book. And if that's an issue that requires prevention, then why haven't other non-professional readings been restricted (like when you read a bedtime story to your kids), and could they be in the future? And what about the sight-disabled readers and their legal right to access text in this manner?

I seriously doubt the Authors Guild is going to sue moms for reading Dr. Seuss, or sue the blind, or sue publishers for allowing that to occur. What's of concern is who's making money from the added value of the reading performance, whether it's a digital voice or not, and the Authors Guild is trying to make sure that a line is drawn in the sand now before an income stream (audio "performance" rights) dries up, because new technology often gives distributors a chance to make extra money before the author realizes how valuable it is.

Decades ago, audio rights were pretty unpopular. They were sorted into many publishers' contracts as ancillary, or completely left out - that is to say, unless it looked profitable for more than just rare radio adaptations. (No one really even tried to distribute novels performed and recorded to LP records–who wanted to flip a record every 30 minutes for a ten hour reading?) What changed all this was the age of the cassette tape: car radios with cassette players and the Sony Walkman. With the new convenient medium that lent itself well to long listening sessions, there was a new market. And publishers eventually started making extra money from the potentially lucrative books-on-tape edition of their texts, often without having paid authors any additional advance for the audio rights. This was good gravy for the publishers when the audiobook was a hit, even though the books-on-tape market was relatively tiny compared to book sales. By the time that CD technology increased the quality and cost efficiency per unit further, authors and agents already knew it was worthwhile to negotiate better terms and payments for the audio rights, to make sure that this commodity was now compensating everyone properly. In some cases, the rights were starting to be reserved by the agents so that they could be sold to the growing field of specialty audiobook publishers. In the last 8 years, MP3 file distribution of these recordings (especially through iTunes or Audible) has only made the market more competitive. So, unlike 40 years ago, today everyone is aware that the audio rights can make money when handled properly.

The primary distinction of the audio rights is not so much that a real human voice is involved and compensated; it's more that a publisher consented reading or "performance" of the book has controlled distribution (each copy is accounted for), and that the proportionate value of this performance makes money for the publisher and author. This is why parents reading to their kids isn't an issue, or even teachers reading in a classroom. In those cases, the average reader is adding a negligable value (commercially speaking) to the book by speaking it aloud themselves, and that's fair use. Now if that reader wants to go on stage (or the web) and sell their reading performance without publisher consent, it's another story.

With computer assisted reading, the value added is a bit more contentious. First of all, there are disabled readers who require text to be spoken aloud, and digital voice reading is a welcome technology for them. This service is valuable to those people, sometimes at a premium. However, the typical expectation is that disabled readers are adding the value themselves through assistant technology, and that they haven't paid inclusively for that assistance when they purchased the text. For example, you don't pay an additional $1 for read-aloud service offered to you from the book you've bought. You paid $357 for the Kindle 2, which adds that service to the book.

The cost of the digital voice application is a moot point to publishers, agents, and authors. What worries them is that in the future the voice applications are going dramatize the text too well, and that the additional exceptional value isn't compensated to them in any way under current contracts. Amazon's Kindle 2 was developed with the read-aloud function to add value not only to the Kindle, but to make the books themselves a better commodity–to sell more books.

Picture the future, when you've got an e-book of the latest bestseller and you ask your little e-book device to read it to you. Right in front of you pops up a digital hologram of John Houseman (licensed to the device by the actor's estate), and he proceeds to read the book to you in his nuanced dramatic voice (recreated through excellent programming). He reads Chapter 4 to you while you prepare dinner in the kitchen. He sits in the passenger seat, delivering chapter 14 as you commute to work the next day. This is essentially the benefit of read-aloud, although the Kindle 2 or Apple's Text-To-Speech isn't quite that far advanced yet. However, I'm sure you can see that a good digital voice has the future potential to add a lot of value to the reading, enough to give today's properly recorded audio books something to worry about.

The issue is that this value added isn't accounted for in current distribution contracts between the publisher and e-book retailers like Amazon, and potential publisher revenue might be getting lost (or cheated away from the future), and that's what rankles the Authors Guild. I'm not a fan of sword waiving tactics, but there needs to be new descriptive contract language that pertains to the read-aloud service. I'm not sure how accounting for the read-aloud service in financial terms can be done until there's a proven track record for consumer habits with this technology. Those numbers aren't available yet. But Amazon and other companies are investing in the technology more and more, so someone sees there's money to be made there in the future.

In many ways, it's an issue not unlike protecting song performance rights so that companies like YouTube can't make money off "free" performances of copyrighted material. (I'm not sure an amateur 8 year-old singing Miley Cyrus songs for YouTube has much value, but aggregate all the entertainment from thousands of such videos and it starts to paint a different picture until it appears obvious the songwriter is due some small increment of YouTube's revenue from distributing those clips.) Publishers don't want to chase after innocent people, but they also don't want to encourage wholesale ripoffs with loose legal terms. So maybe it isn't a bad idea to start new discussions with all the major players now about the audio rights for e-books and bring the agenda to Amazon's Jeff Bezos or a company like Google. I'm looking forward to having David Niven read me Sherlock Holmes stories on my Kindle 4 and I'd hate for anything to stand in the way.

- Michael Gaudet

Smitten with Screens

In Watching Books, an Authors Guild Bulletin article published last summer, I wrote

Reading text on a screen without sound, color, or movement, one develops the uneasy feeling that something is missing. We wonder, Is that all there is? I’m not a psychologist but it seems more than likely that we are bringing to text viewed on screens the same expectations we bring to television, movie and computer screens. Indeed, something is missing! How can we not be disappointed - even, God help us, bored - when these blocks of words fail to stimulate the same intense response as a YouTube video? We are trying to extract a linear experience out of a nonlinear medium.

As I'm not a social scientist, these observations were not supported by hard research or statistics. Thanks to Randall Stross, a professor of business at San Jose State University writing in the New York Times, they are now powerfully reinforced by metrics supplied by such solid data gathering organizations as Nielsen and ComScore.

Surprisingly, Stross focuses not so much on the Internet as on television. You'd think that TV, like print media, would be losing ground to YouTube and other Web distractions (nearly 100 million viewers watched 5.9 billion YouTube videos in December alone!). In fact, watching television in the third quarter of 2008 increased by five hours a month compared to the same period in 2007. "Tellingly," says Stross, "YouTube has not cannibalized TV viewership - it has instead carved out another chunk of our leisure time for video on a screen."

In short, whether it's YouTube or BoobTube, "A tipping point has been passed in the competition between print and screen that has been under way since the beginning of broadcast TV and now continues with video and other media."

Stross's conclusion: "People are showing a clear preference for a fully formed video experience that comes ready to play on a screen, requiring nothing but our passive attention."

In Watching Books, I wrote,

The fundamental appeal of books is their ability to transport us to the author’s world. The best books immerse us so deeply in that world that we become almost immune to distraction. But screens are breeders of distraction from the sort of commitment to thinking, reflecting, and imagining that books demand. Books are vehicles for ideas; one can set a book down and ruminate and process. Computer monitors, television sets, and e-book screens discourage reflection. Thinkers simply live in a different time zone from watchers.

Stross echoes my own disheartening comments: "We used to speak of reading a book as an immersive experience, too, but 'immersive' now seems shorthand for 'video on a screen.'"

"Smitten with screens" is his phrase for it, and I can't think of a better one. Read Why Television Still Shines in a World of Screens in full and - if you can spare a little time between your TV programs and your Internet videos - reflect.

Richard Curtis

Professionals Elbowing Amateurs Off YouTube?

There was no YouTube when poet Robert Frost penned the deathless line, "Nothing gold can stay." But if he were alive today he would certainly feel his image aptly described the possible fate of YouTube as professionals get set to move in on it. The very zeitgeist of the 21st century represented by the ingenuity, the spontaneous combustiveness, the wacky hilarity, the instant, viral, visceral responsiveness of a public that knew what it loved and voted for it with billions of mouseclicks, may now be giving way to the slick creations of Hollywood television and film companies backed by studio and network money, branded sponsors, and calculating marketers. Here's a quote from Brian Stelter's reportage in the New York Times:

YouTube and the William Morris Agency, the Hollywood talent agency, are close to signing a deal that would place the company’s clients in made-for-the-Web productions.

The deal would underscore the ways that distribution models are evolving on the Internet. Already, some actors and other celebrities are creating their own content for the Web, bypassing the often arduous process of developing a program for a television network. The YouTube deal would give William Morris clients an ownership stake in the videos they create for the Web site.

From the beginning Google recognized the commercial potential of YouTube when it acquired the emerging phenomenon, paying a then eye-popping $1.65 for it (a price that in restrospect seems like a steal). But despite 100 million visitors a month, monetizing YouTube's content and making Google's investment back has not proven to be a slam-dunk thanks to the complexities and potential liabilities of copyright. Now that it looks as if the William Morris Agency is taking charge of the packaging and selling, you can be sure that copyright clearances will be diligently handled, production values will soar, lots of money will be made, and something precious will be spoiled.

Fred Davis, a senior partner at an entertainment law firm, is quoted by Stelter as commenting that “Although everyone realizes that the monetization of this content is not quite there yet, everyone also realizes the huge potential as the digital media business matures.”

Well, Hollywood, there are millions of us who don't want YouTube to mature. We like it just the way it is -- embarrassingly sophomoric, amateurish, LOL hilarious, pathetic, dopey, dirty, funky, and utterly counterculture. It belongs to We the People. Can't you go co-opt some other industry? We can think of a lot of them that could use your genius, your money and your values.

Nothing gold can stay, but as for the innocent fun of a freshly posted video produced by an inspired amateur, we can quote another poet on that score, Robert Graves: Good-bye to All That.

- Richard Curtis