I think Blount got it right early on: "quixotic". I think the wiser choice would be to target licensing: that an individual receives a license for use of a particular work. Draconian licenses are foolish and will eventually result in your industry collapsing when something better comes along. As such, I'd argue for the Authors Guild to work toward a license for text representation with primitive formatting (i.e. sentences and paragraphs, not illustrations and stylized presentation) for the Kindle and technologies like it. For it's just as valid to argue that changing the text size or typeface results in a different presentation -- and therefore a "new" version that should be separately purchased.
On Feb 25, 8:41 am, Eric Scoles <[email protected]> wrote: > ... Think of the difference > between MIDI and MP3 -- this would be analogous to sending a MIDI file with > more instructions in it. Doesn't take any more processing > power to change timbre, say, because that's just altering a parameter > on something the software is already doing, anyway. As far as I know, the technologies are not all that different. MP3 is kind of like musical instructions to play particular cilia in your ears to simulate the aural experience -- something that could be done with a modified version of MIDI. That said, I think it's reasonable to have a separate license for a performance by a particular reader: human or machine. If Kindle's reader is just reading the plain text, then it falls under the plain text license I mentioned above. If it encodes additional information beyond plain text, then it's a performance that deserves a different license. ---Jason Olshefsky --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
