Monday, March 02, 2009

Luddite alert

Some days ago BoingBoing posted an item which left me shaking my head...

"In yesterday's New York Times, Author's Guild president Roy Blount Jr. rails against the Kindle's
[E-book reader] text-to-speech feature, opining that it infringes copyright because it provides a 'derivative work' by creating audio editions of your textfiles. Blount says that eventually, text-to-speech will be so darned perfect, the audiobook market will be destroyed by it, so he aims to do something about it right now.
"

My thought was that poor Mr Blount must be deluded. How insane to presume that a text-to-speech program could ever equate the performance of a live human speaker.


Will Wheaton posted audio
here which confirms my view.

And the cartoon at the left... it serves as a reminder that any technological advance brings to crypto-Luddites crawling, yapping vociferously, out of the woodwork.

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