Disappointing: Obama Administration Won't Support Treaty For Helping Blind Get Digital Books
from the shame dept
JJ points us to an unfortunate story that the Obama administration appears to be siding against an intellectual property treaty agreement that would have helped blind and visually impaired individuals by allowing "the cross-border import and export of digital copies of books and other copyrighted works in formats that are accessible to persons who are blind, visually impaired, dyslexic or have other reading disabilities, using special devices that present text as refreshable braille, computer generated text to speech, or large type." As the article notes, exceptions to copyright law for the production of books for the blind is common, and effectively this would expand that to ebooks. Many had hoped that the administration would support it... but:Assurances coming into the negotiations this week that things were going in the right direction have turned out to be false, as the United States delegation has basically read from a script written by lobbyists for publishers, extolling the virtues of market based solutions, ignoring mountains of evidence of a "book famine" and the insane legal barriers to share works.It continues to be a massive disappointment that politicians keep bowing down to corporate pressure when it clearly goes against the very purpose of copyright law.
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Filed Under: blind, copyright, obama administration, treaties
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Market based??
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You mis-understand. The lobbyists aren't working for the people producing books for the blind, they're working for the book industry in general.
Groups who support the blind wanted exceptions made so that ebooks could be used by blind people. In other words, they wanted to be able to break the DRM to allow those ebooks to be used with readers that would render them in braille or read them aloud and the book industry lobbyists fought against that, arguing that ebooks must[/i> have DRM and that everyone should just let the market sort it out.
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Giving everything away for free isn't the only solution in life.
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Any thing that is digital can be shared one way or another.
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Because any ebook you "buy" from a major publisher is going to come saddled with DRM that restricts what you can do with it. Amazon's Kindle 2 has a text to speech feature, but Amazon bowed to the publishing industry and created a software-controlled kill switch for it. So now any publisher who doesn't want the Kindle to read their books aloud can simply disable that feature for their book. Why would they do that? Because they can.
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It's talking about formats that allow the blind to use "special devices that present text as refreshable braille, computer generated text to speech, or large type."
SO YES you CAN say that this wouldn't hurt audio book sales unless of course your plan was to make blind people pay more to get an audio book. In which case you were (note the subjunctive here) a jackass.
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Do it for the blind children's seeing eye puppy?
Brought to you by Sarah Mcluaghlin and the world's most unwatchable commercial...
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What a great idea. Let's get rid of governmental granted monopolies such as copyright, and all the corresponding laws and treaties, and let a truly free market sort this out without any governmental interference!
I'd guess we'd have some real innovation taking place and people would have greater and cheaper access to music, books, movies, etc. What a brave suggestion coming from an industry which has long survived on what is essentially corporate welfare.
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The Messiah
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Well if Jesus would start pulling his weight around here and come back from his 2000 year break, he wouldn't have to.
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That's probably true.
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Congeniality is fun...
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You will surely incur the mighty wrath of the OBAMA=:D
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By deffinition a polititian is a property bought and payed for. What else can you expect from them?
When I heard my sister saying she was considering a political career, I stopped talking to her for 2 years. She eventually got the message.
I have more respect for drug dealer, that is doing harm to a few kids, then I have for ANY polititian in the world. Those scumbags I consider bellow human.
Apparently, I have seen no actual proof, they provide a service of some kind. Even if that proves to be true, wich I really doubt, one for each city would be more then enough. The rest, well, I can think of several uses, being fertilizer the best so far.
For all of you, that really think a polititian is someone important, I can only say... I just saw Santa Claus having a drink with Superman.
Have a nice one...
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I'm sure not all publishers were part of this lobby...
http://www.webscription.net/news.aspx?showarticle=2
I'm pretty sure that they've been doing it since longer than last November, as I thought I'd originally read about it in '07, but it's been a while since I actually looked at the page.
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The answer is..
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Disappointing: Obama Administration Won't Support Treaty For Helping Blind Get Digital Books
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The bibliophile in me cries for the poor blind children and their seeing eye puppies. How much should we wager that if it had been a prime time news issue big O would have been all for it?
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