Intellectual Property Law

Wanted: Your Stories of Disability Versus Copyright Law

By danny

In preparation for WIPO's initiative on Exceptions & Limitations to Copyright, the US Copyright Office is currently soliciting comments on the topic of "facilitating access to copyrighted works for the blind or persons with other disabilities". Written comments are due next week (April 21st, 2009), and there will be a public meeting in Washington on May 18th. EFF will be sending our own submission, as will many other IP and disability groups. But if you've worked on software or hardware to overcome your own visual or other disabilities, or co-operated informally (perhaps in an open source project) to provide wider access to content for users with disabilities, or have dealt with a publisher regarding the accessibility of texts, we'd like to encourage you to send the copyright office your own stories — and cc: us at accessibility@eff.org.

Much of current IP law on increasing accessibility to content is concerned with exceptions for narrow conditions or traditional institutions. For instance, the Chafee Amendment provides for free ebooks for the blind, but only through "authorized entities" — such as a dedicated non-profit or government agency. The Copyright Office's triennial "scratching their personal itch", as well as loosely-organized groups. If DMCA's anti-circumvention laws (and ebook DRM) have prevented you as an individual, for example, from format-shifting content to a form usable by assistive technology, or even changed the font size of an ebook to a readable level, please send your story. Unexpected applications of new technology are important to raise too: if you are deaf, and wish to benefit for the possibility of "signing books" (many who are deaf from birth have difficulties with learning to read, and benefit from visual hand-signs in the same way that the visually-impaired benefit from simultaneous text-to-speech), write in.

As the Register of Copyrights noted when considering the anti-circumvention exemption for ebooks, the transition of media to the digital world

perhaps for the first time offer an individual blind person the possibility of "self-help" in making a copy of a literary work perceptible.

We want to make sure that the Copyright Office hears from everyone who is helping themselves, and yet finds their way thwarted by clumsy law or unnecessary technological restrictions.

The full text of the Notice of Inquiry is below (and also available as PDF here).

read more

Full post as published by Electronic Freedom Foundation - Deep Links on April 15, 2009 (boomark / email).