See, I found a web site from AT&T that lets you type in text and have their speech synthesizer speak it, and you can download the sounds as wav files. Blah, blah, blah.
Anyway, I downloaded wav files of that thing (called Text To Speech, TTS) reciting the Lewis Carroll poem Jabberwocky from Through The Looking Glass. I used it in a song, which came out really, really good. BUT the damned AT&T site says you can't use downloaded speech for "commercial or professional" purposes unless you obtain a license. So I started a chain of emails to AT&T and the company that's selling the license for TTS (the commercial product goes by the name Natural Voices or something like that).
To their credit, AT&T responded really quickly to my emails, first saying that it was okay to use short vocal snips in non-commercial music "as long as it is not a substantial amount of the work you do." Like a few seconds of voice in a 3 minute song.
Well, the whole poem is the focus of my song, so I asked for clarification and the AT&T guy answers, "Hmm, better get a license for that." So I look at the web page for Natural Voices and I see that a Developers Kit costs $295. I don't want to develop a system using speech synthesis, so I email them asking if there is any other way to get a license that isn't a developers kit.
The answer they sent was that it sounded like I need a Runtime license. "If you want to distribute the intellectual property--copies of the speech engine or audio produced by it--then you need a distributor license." AKA a Runtime license. Those cost only $7.50 per use . . . But you have to purchase a minimum of 200 of them . . . Yes, $1,500!
So I had basically asked how I can get a cheaper license than $300 and their answer was, by paying $1,500
All this trouble just to try and post a 2 minute song here for free download.
Anybody have enough legal savy to see a way through this? It ticks me off that they consider audio output from their software as their intellectual property. To me that's like a piano manufacturer claiming every song you play on their piano is intellectual property owned by them . . . shell out $7.50 per song played on that piano for the Runtime lisense.
Have you heard MC Hawking? Hilarious. 
