Kindling a Derivative Works Controversy

When I heard the Author’s Guild claim that Amazon’s new Kindle 2 text-to-speech feature violated an author’s copyright, all I could first think of was . . . good grief.  And being a lawyer with a good stable of Yiddish terms, the phrases “oy vey” and “meshugenah” came to mind also.  This nifty feature allows the Kindle to read the e-book’s text to the user in a computer-generated voice.  But Paul Aiken, the Guild’s Executive Director, stated very matter-of-factly:  “They don’t have the right to read a book out loud.”

There’s something inherently silly about this statement which makes me want to unequivocally proclaim: “That’s ridiculous!”  After all, when you buy a book, you certainly have a right to read it out loud, whether to yourself, your children, your colleagues, or to the friends in your book club.  This is a “fair use.”  Is it really that different if a machine does it for you—at least in this limited instance?

You probably already know that you don’t have the right under copyright law to publicly perform a literary work.  You can’t, for example, hold a public gathering open to all and begin reading salient portions of a book out loud for all to hear solely for the purpose of disseminating it (and for no other reason).  This would almost certainly constitute infringement.  And you also couldn’t record yourself reading the book out loud to your children or friends and then sell or give away the recording.  That would be infringement also.

Aiken, however, isn’t raising the public performance or the recording issues (at least not directly).  Rather, he’s claiming that the Kindle’s speech feature creates a “derivative work.”  This seems like a bit of a stretch, but not a wholly unreasonable one.  As I’ve said before, intellectual property law is a highly nuanced area of practice, and many courts don’t see eye-to-eye on these issues.  Easy answers are usually elusive, even though common sense may compel a rush to judgment.  Let’s take a look at the issue.  Under the Copyright Act, a derivative work is defined as:

A work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a “derivative work”.

17 U.S.C. § 101 (emphasis added).  At first blush, it doesn’t seem to me that a device which reads a book’s text out loud to a person who lawfully possesses the copy would meet the “original work of authorship” test.

For example, it makes sense why translating a book from one language to another is a derivative work.  It takes a certain degree of deliberate judgment and choice on behalf of those translating a book for a different audience to convey what the author is trying to express.  This would meet the minimum level of creativity needed for originality.  But that’s not the case here with the Kindle.  (For the moment, I’ll sidestep the more difficult question of whether automatic translation software creates a derivative work.  If the Kindle was translating the book AND then reading it aloud, it would present a more complicated issue.)

But the originality question here is a deceptively simple one, and some of the analyses I’ve read so far—in their somewhat understandable quest to show that common sense should dictate that the law respond with a resounding, “NO” in this instance—overlook subtle distinctions which need to be analyzed carefully.

Michael Kwun of the Electronic Frontier Foundation takes the position that there’s no way a derivative work could be created due to the originality requirement.  While he may ultimately be correct in the result, his analysis fails to take into account several factors.  For example, he confidently cites the case of Lewis Galoob Toys, Inc. v. Nintendo of America, Inc., 964 F.2d 965 (9th Cir. 1992), for the proposition that a derivative work “must incorporate a protected work in some concrete or permanent ‘form,’” which he argues that the Kindle’s audio feature fails to do as no recording is ever made.

While the Galoob court stated this, it also noted that, “[a] derivative work must be fixed to be protected under the act . . . but not to infringe.” (emphasis in original).  Thus, in order for it to be copyrightable, the derivative work has to be fixed, but if it infringes it doesn’t have to be—yet it must be in some “concrete or permanent form.”

If this distinction seems fleeting to you, you’re not alone.  Kwun fails to note that other courts have disagreed with the 9th Circuit’s approach.  For instance, in Lee v. Deck the Walls, Inc., 925 F. Supp. 576 (N.D. Ill. 1996), an Illinois district court expressly rejected this rationale:

Respectfully, the Ninth Circuit’s determination of a dual definition (1) “risks that courts will naively apply this broad definition to find activities infringing that are more properly viewed as altogether beyond the scope of copyright,” . . . and (2) ignores the definition of a “derivative work” found in § 101, in which Congress specifically included an originality requirement.

In affirming the Lee court’s holding, the 7th Circuit (in Lee v. A.R.T. Co., 125 F.3d 580 (7th Cir. 1997)) also found the 9th Circuit’s approach to be lacking:

If Lee (and the ninth circuit) are right about what counts as a derivative work, then the United States has established through the back door an extraordinarily broad version of authors’ moral rights, under which artists may block any modification of their works of which they disapprove.

Moreover, the 9th Circuit seems to have significantly loosened the originality requirement for derivative works in Mirage Editions, Inc. v. Albuquerque A.R.T. Co., 856 F.2d 1341 (9th Cir. 1988).  There the court found that a company which purchased legitimate copies of the plaintiff’s artwork and glued them onto ceramic tiles, which it then resold, was creating illegal derivative works.  This case has also been met with significant criticism by courts and commentators due to the lack of creativity and originality that such activities by the defendant actually entailed.

Other courts have also declined to follow the 9th Circuit’s approach.  In Precious Moments, Inc. v. La Infantil, Inc., 971 F. Supp. 66 (D.P.R. 1997), the district court noted:

Reading Galoob in conjunction with Mirage, however, it appears that the Ninth Circuit also relaxes the originality requirement when considering whether a work is a derivative work for purposes of infringement. Even if Galoob was correct with regard to fixation, Mirage reads the originality requirement out of the definition of “derivative work.”

Thus, while Kwun may have ultimately arrived at the correct result, 9th Circuit precedent doesn’t firmly support his position.

Indeed, if the Precious Moments court is correct, originality isn’t even a requirement when creating a derivative work and  “open[s] the door for the most trivial of modifications to generate an infringing derivative work.”  Consequently, notwithstanding Kwun’s belief that the 9th Circuit’s standard immunizes Amazon from liability, the Kindle 2′s text-to-speech feature could potentially be “trivial” enough to be deemed an infringing derivative work under another formulation of the 9th Circuit’s approach.  As discussed below, the 2nd Circuit (where suit would most likely be brought) appears to have expressly rejected this rationale.

Moreover, there are also some practical considerations that Kwun fails to take into account.  As noted above, standards of originality vary from circuit to circuit, and Kwun makes the implicit and unsubstantiated assumption that if the Guild were to sue Amazon, it would sue in Washington state, where the 9th Circuit’s test would be applied.  This is unlikely.  As a litigator, I often wrestle with forum and venue issues and their importance shouldn’t be underestimated—it can make all the difference in the world.

While Amazon is located in Seattle, the Author’s Guild is located in New York, which is the 2nd Circuit’s jurisdiction.  The 2nd Circuit would apply its own test and isn’t bound by anything that the 9th Circuit does.  (And even though the 9th Circuit handles many intellectual property cases due to Silicon Valley and Hollywood, it’s still the most reversed circuit by the Supreme Court—about 86% in 2007—and its rationale would likely be met with considerable skepticism in New York.)  So if the Guild were to sue, it would almost certainly bring suit in a jurisidiction favorable to itself, and that’s not the 9th Circuit.

In fact, in Durham Indus., Inc. v. Tomy Corp., 630 F.2d 905 (2d Cir. 1980), the 2nd Circuit appears to have rejected the 9th Circuit’s questionable dual approach to derivative works:

First, to support a copyright the original aspects of a derivative work must be more than trivial. Second, the scope of protection afforded a derivative work must reflect the degree to which it relies on preexisting material and must not in any way affect the scope of any copyright protection in that preexisting material.

Thus—assuming that the court doesn’t distinguish between copyrightability and infringement (and the Lee court cites to the 2nd Circuit in this regard)—in order for the Kindle’s speech feature to be deemed non-infringing under the 2nd Circuit’s test, Amazon would have to show that: (1) the speech feature is “trivial,” even if it constitutes original expression; or (2) there is no “scope of protection” for the text-to-speech feature because even though it relies upon the author’s preexisting expression in order to generate its audio, no recording is ever made (as discussed shortly) and it therefore doesn’t affect any exclusive rights in the preexisting material.  (As the test is conjunctive, Amazon only has to show that it fails to meet one of the elements to succeed in its defense.)

It is this last point upon which the Guild appears to be focusing.  It seems concerned that this feature could somehow impact audio book sales and therefore affect an author’s ability to commercially exploit the audio aspects of the work.  Several commentators, however, have correctly noted that it’s unlikely an unfeeling, monotone computer-generated voice could ever replace an audiobook read by a live person.  I’ll take a book read by James Earl Jones any day over one read by the HAL 9000.

Another commentator, Nilay Patel, states that what the Guild is essentially arguing in a roundabout way is that while Amazon has the right to sell you the electronic version of the book, it can’t sell you a recording of the book, which the speech feature emulates.  He notes that the claim isn’t as “ridiculous as it seems.”

While Patel states that the Kindle’s “text-to-speech feature blurs the line between books and recordings,” sound recordings under the Copyright Act are defined as  “works that result from the fixation of a series of musical, spoken, or other sounds . . . .”  17 U.S.C. § 101 (emphasis added).  Fixation is absent here.  As Kwun correctly notes, the Kindle 2′s sounds are not fixed but “immediately trail away into the ether.”  So under the statute, it’s not technically a sound recording.  But that doesn’t make it a “ridiculous” claim either.

Finally, as mentioned earlier,  “fair use” would be a major—and likely successful—defense if the Guild ever sued Amazon.  Amazon would almost certainly cite the ubiquitous “substantial non-infringing use” rule from Sony Corp. of Am. v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984).  It’s practically a staple defense in every technology lawyer’s arsenal these days.  And it may prove to be a persuasive one.

Surely the legion of customers who may want to listen to a computer-generated voice in the privacy of their own homes should be allowed to do so, shouldn’t they?  The technology does appear to have substantial non-infringing uses along the same lines as video recorders and “time-shifting” of programs did in the Sony case.  Instead of reading to themselves, consumers are simply “voice-shifting,” i.e., letting the Kindle read to them.

Ultimately, the Guild’s position seems like a weak claim, but not one devoid of merit.  It could have some teeth if presented in the proper context, but the Guild would have an uphill battle.  As a litigator, I enjoy a good lawsuit (yes, there are such things!) when there are interesting and significant issues at stake.

Alas, however, Amazon doesn’t seem to think so.  At least not at the moment.  The company announced that while it was convinced the audio feature was legal and didn’t violate copyright law, it would give authors and publishers the right to determine, on a book-by-book basis, whether the audio feature would be enabled.  According to one report, Amazon may have retreated from its position due to the contracts that publishers (particularly large publishers) had with their authors over e-book rights.

Sigh.  It would have been an interesting and possibly ground-breaking case in copyright law.  And a good fight besides.  But I’m sure that the next one is right around the corner.  Hey, a lawyer can dream, can’t he?

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