[stylist] Irish Times article on Digital Rights for Disabled & International Issues

[Donna Hill]

Hi Friends,
Is it my imagination, or is the Irish Times doing more to promote the 
rights of America's blind citizens than the New York Times?

Article text follows the link as usual.
Have a good Memorial Day weekend,
Donna Hill
***
Disabled must be given equal digital rights - The Irish Times - Fri, May 
22, 2009
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2009/0522/1224247099810.html

WIRED: Depriving visually impaired people of access to books is but one 
illustration of the need for copyright law to be rewritten, writes
DANNY O'BRIEN

TWO DECADES ago, hardly anyone but a handful of intellectual property 
lawyers paid much attention to the letter of the copyright law. Now, 
like it or not,
we’re all caught up in the fight over what copies we can make, how, and 
for what purpose.

Every act of creation or communication online seems to make some copy 
that we need to double check isn’t infringing. Can we copy our CD 
collection onto
our iPods? Can you stop someone from forwarding the e-mail you sent 
them? Is someone ripping off your website? Your idea? Or are you copying 
their idea?
Everywhere you look, it seems, copyright law looks in need of an overhaul.

Even the most uncontroversial corners of current copyright law seem to 
provoke argument and confusion. Take the tiny subsection of global 
copyright law
I’ve been spending time with this week: the special rights it grants for 
those with disabilities. Many countries make special exception to the 
normal rules
of copying for those who need special formats to access them. Irish and 
United States law, for instance, both allow designated bodies to convert 
books
into braille or audiobooks for the blind.

Sadly, the law hasn’t kept up with the digital revolution. While the 
internet has granted the rest of us the opportunity to import and export 
books (or
download e-books) globally, the rights of people with disabilities are 
still blocked at the border. The designated authorities in the United 
States can’t
ship their braille books or audio files to Irish libraries, and vice 
versa, because no one knows what the rights are when you wander outside 
your own jurisdiction.

BookShare, a United States organisation with more than 40,000 volumes 
converted into digitally scanned formats for the blind, can 
experimentally export
just 4,000 of those works. The rest are tied up in a copyright limbo. It 
gets worse. The truth is, as e-book readers like the Kindle become 
popular, disabled
readers could do what everyone else does in this networked world – cut 
out the middle man.

They no longer need “designated authorities” to convert an e-book to an 
accessible format. The consumer version of an e-book itself has all the 
data a disabled
person needs to output in any number of different styles.

With the right software and hardware, a reading disabled person’s own 
computer could convert standard commercial e-books into synthesised 
speech, braille,
or display them in ultra-large fonts.

Except, of course, that would be illegal. For almost all the e-books out 
there, disabled users would have to break the law in order to re-format 
the text
with their own readers.

That’s because most e-books are locked down with digital rights 
management (DRM) code, which severely restricts what you can and cannot 
do with the text.

And, of course, Irish law, written back in the digitally prehistoric 
days of 2000, still requires disabled users to depend on a “designated 
authority” to
do their legal copying for them. Disabled users making copies for 
themselves would still be breaking the law.

This is crazy. Companies like Sony and Amazon have done deals to create 
digital versions of hundreds of thousands of books. All of them are just 
one, simple
– yet currently criminal – step away from being readable by blind 
computer users.

In the United States, where some exceptions to the laws regarding 
breaking copy protection are permitted on a temporary basis, disabled 
users have been
granted a special dispensation to break the digital locks on these 
books. That’s a little better than the situation in Ireland.

But frankly, that exception is not much use since, while it allows blind 
users to crack the protection, it doesn’t allow them to tell anyone else 
how they
did it or distribute tools to undo the DRM. Consequently, each disabled 
person has to invent their own way of breaking into their own e-books.

What can be done? Disabled users could gain the powers to make lawful 
copies currently only permitted to “designated bodies” under Irish law. 
But that doesn’t
fix the problem of importing and exporting accessible texts.

A better global solution has recently been proposed by Brazil and the 
World Blind Union: an international treaty for the reading disabled, 
negotiated at
the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). This would not only 
make it easier to import and export works between countries with similar 
exceptions
on their statute books, but it would also encourage other countries to 
grant the same freedoms. The treaty would grant exceptions to unlock DRM 
and also
allow limited commercial operations to re-package and market books 
explicitly for the disabled (the current Irish law only allows 
non-profit groups this
power).

A world treaty would be a great step forward for the reading disabled. 
It would also be the first IP treaty that has taken into account the 
opportunities
of the new digital era. A world law that grants greater access to those 
who most need it seems an excellent 21st century step. It will be 
intriguing to
see if Obama’s new administration and the European Union join Brazil in 
supporting this bold new step.

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times
***
-- 

Read my articles on American Chronicle:
http://www.americanchronicle.com/authors/view/3885

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