about dectalk synthesizer

Hi

DEC was acquired by Compaq, in turn acquired by HP. Ownership of DECtalk was transferred to several companies, among which is Fonix which went out of business not long ago (five or six years, if I remember correctly).

I know that some folks are using emulators to run DECtalk ROM images. This is a gray area work, meaning it could be legal in some countries but not others.

As for copyright and ownership, just because a company went out of business does not grant people the right to disassemble or emulate ROM files. At least in United States where GitHub (and in turn, Microsoft) is headquartered, copyright for works lasts a long time (up to 95 years) for some materials. If a company ceases to exist like Fonix, then overall ownership (and sometimes intellectual property) of DECtalk and related technologies should have been transferred to someone else (a company or a person). Right now we don't know who the new "owner" is, so people are creating gray area materials like ROM image dumps and emulators to parse and run them.

I (and I guess several others) raised copyright+ownership+license concerns because we are dealing with copyright laws of several countries: where the submitter lives, United States (GitHub/Microsoft, Fonix (the last known copyright holder of DECtalk), and Australia (NV Access Limited). This means you must balance what is allowed, what is not, and what counts as gray area for these three countries, although we mostly deal with United States copyright law because of GitHub.

There is another reason for raising copyright concerns: should the DECtalk add-on be accepted in its current form, complete with a ROM image dump (again, this is gray area), should the current (official) developers of DECtalk hear about the add-on, they can ask NV Access to take the add-on down (remove it) from the add-on store. This becomes a problem when the supposedly current developer of DECtalk finds that, in their thinking, you (the submitter) have violated their copyright and license terms i.e. distributed (or at least downloaded) the code in a form that is not acceptable to terms of the license. The best outcome is for NV Access to take down your submission and the community not viewing you favorably for a while. The worst case scenario is DECtalk developers suing you, and well, let's not get into costs and time needed to defend your claims in front of judges.

I say all this to help you see that obtaining an add-on somewhere and submitting it to the store require some thought, especially when working with copyrighted material. For the NVDA screen reader, this shows up a lot when dealing with speech synthesizer add-ons (the community had a long discussoin about this back in July when someone submitted Google TTS to the store and people raised copyright and license concerns; Google TTS submission was ultimately rejected/removed from the add-on store submission queue).

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Joseph

From: Umesh Rathore <umeshrat...@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, September 29, 2026 8:34 AM
To: Joseph Lee <joseph....@gmail.com>
Cc: NVDA Screen Reader Discussion <nvda-...@nvaccess.org>
Subject: Re: about dectalk synthesizer

Hi Umesh, yoor previous message is not in English, in case you want to translate it.

I wanted to share the reference to the closed issue, and sorry if I missed it in previous messages:

Noelia

I suggest to reflect links to relevant sources.

I don't understand the relationship between commercial use and provide or not the source code of a product.

Also, I don't think that this solves copyright issues.

Lastly, personally, I try to use add-ons from authors whose reputation is good. Always, but probably now more than before, considering that add-ons can be created by using artificial intelligence, not always appropriately,I think that we hould take special care about our reputation. This includes being as precise as possible by providing relevant sources in our communication.

Noelia

No, please read my message. I haven't say this.

And see the issue where the add-on was rejected please. I'm not interested in this discussion anymore.

Noelia