Now It's the Authors' Guild's turn to act silly

Authors are having a lot of trouble adjusting to the new realities of 21st century media. First we had the Science Fiction Writers of America getting their knickers in a twist over unauthorized posting of copyrighted works – and making fools of themselves in the process.
Now it's the turn of the Authors' Guild, an organization ostensibly dedicated to protecting the rights of authors. Their dovecote is all aflutter because of Amazon's new e-book reader, the Kindle 2. The technically aware types at the Authors' have discovered that – horrors! – the Kindle 2 has a built-in speech synthesizer which can read the text of an e-book aloud.
The guild immediately cried foul , claiming this violates the authors' copyrights unless the publish has acquired “performance rights” (i.e. audio books) as well as print rights.
To give you an idea of how stupid this is, consider one simple fact: Text to speech isn't unique to Kindle. Both Windows and Mac machines can read text files and in all probability Linux can as well. In other words, nearly every computer out there is capable of reading a downloaded book. What's more, they have been able to do it for years.
This is truly a piece of multi-dimensional silliness. In addition to the fact that most computers can synthesize speech, there's the simple fact that Kindle, like the other computers, doesn't do a very good job of it. The “speech” sounds like the the Cylons on the original Battlestar Galactica. It's intelligible but painful to listen to in large chunks.
Compared to simply synthesizing speech from text, the problem of producing “real” sounding speech is exponentially more complex. It will take a lot more processing power and a lot of sophisticated software development to lick and that sort of power and sophistication isn't going to show up any time soon in a $300 ebook reader.
There's also the little matter of what constitutes a “performance”. Normally that's understood as reading for an audience, specifically a paying audience of multiple people. Considering that this is feature, to the extent it is used at all, will be used almost exclusively to play text files for the person who owns the Kindle 2.
It's going to be interesting to see if the Authors' Guild will put their money where their mouth is and sue Amazon (and Microsoft, and Apple, and everybody else) over this piece of nonsense. They have sued over such things in the past and in fact won a $125 million settlement http://www.dailytech.com/Harvard+Google+Cannot+Reach+Book+Scanning+Agreement/article13360.htm from Google over its program to scan books from major libraries. However that case was a lot more clear cut.
What's really going on here is another failure to understand and accept the changes in the media. The fact is that the old media in general – including an awful lot of print authors and their publishers are not merely clueless when it comes to the changes sweeping over us, they're scared to death of them.
This fear comes out in various irrational acts, many of which are silly on their face.
This is unlikely to go anywhere, but if the Authors' Guild decides to pursue it, my advice is to sit back and enjoy the show.

FALSE POSITIVES

Google as part of the job process?

Lately I've seen a couple of posts, including this one on John Hawks' Anthropology Weblog, about using Google as part of the employment screening process.

Makes sense, right? If you're looking to hire John Smith you want all the information you can get, and Google is a rich source of information on just about anything, including John Smith.

Fine, only which John Smith are you looking at?

In fact trying to use Google to get serious information on someone is usually a really, truly, really bad idea. Without a lot of extra effort and additional identifying information you can't be sure who you've got.

Now "Rick Cook" isn't a terribly common name, but a Google search reveals that I've done a lot of stuff I was totally unaware of.

My favorite is making custom furniture in a little shop in Port Orford, WA.

The close runner-up is my time as a spokesman for a Florida national forest where I'm worried about escaped pet pythons growing to enormous size and eating all the wildlife -- not to mention the tourists.

I also like my time as an engineering manager on the Mars Rover project at JPL.

And I'm doing my bit for the environment as one of the leading "green" architects in America.

Did I mention I am head of security for a casino near New Orleans? Or that I'm the ex-mayor of a small town in California.

And speaking of California I'm also a fairly successful basketball coach in the Los Angeles area.

Oh yeah, I died in a helicopter crash in Scotland several years ago.

Now no one who knows much about me as a computer journalist and sometime writer of science fiction and fantasy novels full of bad computer jokes is likely to confuse any of those people with me. But there are some Rick Cooks out there who can be confused with me -- to the detriment of us both.

For example, I'm a partner in a major high-tech public relations firm. And I'm an expert on the OS/2 operating system. And I'm a regular poster on several newsgroups related to computer technology. And I'm active in the gaming universe.

Those are harder to disambiguate.

In fact unless you have a really good method of singling out your "Rick Cook" from all the other "Rick Cooks" out there it's just about impossible to know who's done what. This is especially true in areas like arrests that don't involve information that would be on a job application.

Even geographical proximity won't do it. There are at least three Rick Cooks in my urban area. The one who I really don't want to be mistaken for is the one who's a prison guard.

Googling your own or someone else's name may be a fun party game, but as a method of gathering information for serious purposes like employment it represents an abuse of the new media.