A long time ago Apple Computer released an operating system called Mac OS9. Microware, the makers of OS-9, sued for trademark infringement and lost. I was quite surprised. It seemed like classic trademark dilution to me.
Then a few years later Apple released Mac OS X. In Mac OS X, they included an Application Framework called Cocoa. That’s awfully close to the nick name of my favorite computer: The CoCo. Hmm, that’s suspicious.
Now I learn Apple is creating a new JavaScript engine called Nitro. Very similar to the OS-9 retooling called NitrOS-9. Well, now I am calling it: Apple hates Color Computers!

I hope this doesn’t turn into a Lost blog, but I have got to get this off my chest.
I really believe a new time time has been created by the Losties in the 70s.

The Hyrda station has not been cleared of Dharma stuff. The dock (where the submarine was blown up) seems still intact. The barracks were never de-Dharma-ified. The Dharma recruit photos were still on the wall in the orientation building.

It looks like to me that both Dharma and the Others (hostiles) were purged by something our Losties did in the 70s. It’s like the purge in the 90s never happened. Or maybe, the rules were changed when Alex was killed, just like Ben said.

Wil Wheaton posted a wonderful example of how machine reading of text compares unfavorably to a real performance. He performed a small section of one of his stories and played it next to a standard machine reading. The difference was easy to understand. The human performance trounced the machine.

We know that that text to speech technology does not constitute creating a copy, thus cannot be considered a derived work under the copyright statute. Eventually technology will become good enough to replace the time consuming recording process a good audio book deserves.

For some books a machine reading will be sufficient. Automatic reading will improve over time and more and more books will become very listenable using the technology. But some works of art need to be performed. How will that be handled?

A while ago I was reading about Apple’s text to speech engine and discovered that you can add codes to the text stream to modify the how the machine will read the data aloud. It would be safe to assume Microsoft’s text to speech engine includes the same functionality. It would also be safe to assume the two implementations differ in the codes they use. Someone skilled in the arts could use these codes to start directing the text to speech engine, thus creating a true performance. This would never happen in a world with multiple standards.

I propose to assign a Unicode code page to create a similar set of codes that all text to speech system could understand. When a text document is sold to a customer, the codes could be included in the text stream, but made invisible by the Unicode standard. Or they could be sold separately. This will allow reading and listening to the same file.

Authors to not have the right to be paid extra for reading aloud of their text. If automatic text to speech is good enough for you then the authors will not have an opportunity to sell you an additional copy of their work. But using this scheme, authors could go the extra distance to add value to their text and then deserve the extra money.