DISQUS

Also, the mother reading to her child probably qualifies under any standard of fair use.

You seem really really angry at the Author's Guild. Maybe your anger is causing you to skip over the part of the post where you convincingly argue that the Author's Guild is completely nuts here. My sense is that they are, in fact, SOL and that bottling up such a useful technology to protect the voice-acted audiobook market is just not feasible. But it seems crazy to expect them NOT to make this kind of legal argument, and if they do have some kind of claim on the audio versions of certain books then I'd say their argument is prima facie not absurd.

I haven't heard of most of these people, and I spend a lot of time on the internet.

I share your borderline-revulsion at the idea that the Mumbai terrorist attacks could have been prevented by Twitter. However, I don't think that a "social media plan" necessarily requires that panicked citizens follow new emergency protocols. I imagined a government official in a room looking for incoming messages describing an emergency situation, which only require that one or more people who see a guy pull a gun (or whatever) decide to sound the virtual alarm.

But it's hard to know how something like this could be implemented effectively while still maintaining some semblance of privacy (you'd have to just look at the universe of Tweets from a particular city), so yeah I guess I'm still a little skeptical.

Just want to point out that first commenter Dean is completely wrong about the "compromise" legislation only permitting interception of calls to known terrorists.