Amazon has caved to pressure from the Authors Guild, who indicated that it might sue over the text-to-speech technology in the Kindle. Amazon maintained that the feature was legal, but presumably dropped the feature for business reasons.
Amazon Caves on Kindle
March 1, 2009
Share this post
3 Comments

Law Bytes
Episode 275: David Loukidelis on Why Stripping Privacy Enforcement from Canada’s Privacy Commissioner in Bill C-36 is Unnecessarily Risky Policy
byMichael Geist

June 22, 2026
Michael Geist
Search Results placeholder
Michael Geist on Substack
Recent Posts
Why Being Locked Out of Frontier AI is The Sovereignty Threat Canada Missed
Blocked Twice: How Bill C-34’s Kids’ Social Media Ban Would Compound the Online News Act’s Harm to Young Canadians’ News Access
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 275: David Loukidelis on Why Stripping Privacy Enforcement from Canada’s Privacy Commissioner in Bill C-36 is Unnecessarily Risky Policy
The Data on Australia’s Social Media Ban: The Better the Privacy Protection, The Less Effective the Ban
Shaky Ground Gets Shakier: What the U.S. Supreme Court’s Location Data Decision Means for Bill C-22

Ficticious copyright violation?
The BOOK is the “product” that is copyrighted.
Any audio package for such a book would be directly DERIVED FROM that book, and should only be considered “reading” the work. It’s not a “sound track”, in the “movie” or “music” sense, and the book is complete without it.
It’s utter nonsense that someone can/would claim “copyright” over the very ACT of reading anything, as such a copyright could make ANY reading of a book “illegal”.
What would that mean for schools??
Reading a book, and even recording that reading can’t possibly constitute “copying” the product itself.
This is madness.
The practice of copyright itself needs to die.
>sigh
I realize one shouldn’t “feel sorry” for people with vision impairments, but it seems the blind are the collateral damage here. Exemptions don’t mean **** if the feature gets pulled before market.
Not like that impacts Canadians anyway.
CNIB should sue…
For discrimination.