Under pressure from authors, audio publishers and other audio rights-holders, Amazon pulled back from its initiative to convert the texts of Kindle e-books to speech without permission. The company declared that it is

“modifying our systems so that rightsholders can decide on a title-by-title basis whether they want text-to-speech enabled or disabled for any particular title. We have already begun to work on the technical changes required to give authors and publishers that choice. With this new level of control, publishers and authors will be able to decide for themselves whether it is in their commercial interests to
leave text-to-speech enabled.”

Amazon did not concede that its provocative act of enabling text-to-speech infringed on anybody’s audio rights. In fact it asserted that the “experimental text-to-speech feature is
legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given.” That said, “Nevertheless, we strongly believe many rightsholders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver’s seat.”

Whether Amazon did or did not have a leg to stand on, the high stakes of a possible rights infringement on the interests of a billion dollar audio industry all but guaranteed litigation. Though many opponents of Amazon’s text-to-speech function would prefer to do away with it altogether, they may have to live with the voluntary, book by book nature of Amazon’s revised position. Indeed, because of Federal disability mandates requiring the function to be embedded in e-books, a complete termination of text-to-speech might actually be unlawful. For now, calm has descended over Kindle City and Authors Guild and other opponents are withdrawing their tanks to the perimeter.

For background on the dispute you can click on our recent summary, and for details of Amazon’s concession, link to cnet’s coverage.

RC