Bedtime Stories Banned?

Every night, millions of parents walk into their children's bedrooms, premeditatedly grab a book off the shelf, and intentionally and with malice aforethought read that book outloud to a soon-to-be-asleep child.

Don't try this at home.

Not without first checking with your attorney.

The Wall St. Journal reports:

"They don't have the right to read a book out loud," said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. "That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law."



Paul Aiken's words, courtesy of AT&T Labs

Actually, Aiken was speaking of Amazon.com's new "Kindle," a wireless reading device which has a similar text-to-speech technology and allows buyers to hear the text of the growing number of books available on the reader.

But just in case, we recommend buying and giving your child the Audiobook version of the bedtime story instead of personally and lovingly reading it aloud without legal permission.

Copyright attorneys may be listening.